In the Shadow of the Moon

In the Shadow of the Moon

Outward Odyssey A People’s History of Spaceflight Series editor Colin Burgess

IN THE SHAD

Francis French and Colin Burgess With a foreword by Walter Cunningham

OW OF THE MOON A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

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LINCOLN AND LONDON

© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska ¶ All rights reserved ¶ Manufactured in the United States of America ¶ ∞ ¶ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ¶ French, Francis. ¶ In the shadow of the moon : a challenging journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 / Francis French and Colin Burgess ; with a foreword by Walter Cunningham. ¶ p. cm. — ¶ (Outward odyssey : a people’s history of spaceflight) ¶ Includes bibliographical references. ¶ isbn-13: 978-0-8032-1128-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-1128-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ¶ 1. Project Apollo (U.S.) ¶ 2. Space flight to the moon. ¶ 3. Astronautics— United States—History—20th century. ¶ 4. Space race—History. ¶ I. Burgess, Colin. ¶ II. Title. ¶ tl789.8.u6a5337 2007 ¶ 629.45'4—dc22 ¶ 2006103047 ¶ Set in Adobe Garamond and Futura by Bob Reitz. ¶ Designed by R. W. Boeche.

For Dee O'Hara Spacefarers need more than engineers to support them.

Over the mountains of the moon, Down the valley of the shadow, Ride, boldly ride. Edgar Allen Poe, Eldorado

Contents List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii 1. Gemini Raises the Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. A Rendezvous in Space. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 3. The Ballet of Weightlessness. . . . . . . . . . . 90 4. The Risk Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 5. The Astronaut Enigma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 6. Starting Over . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 7. Leaving the Good Earth. . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 8. A Test Pilot’s Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 9. The Highest Mountain . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 Epilogue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .411 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .413

Illustrations John Young and Gus Grissom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Ed White and Jim McDivitt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 Gordon Cooper and Charles (Pete) Conrad . . . . . . . .41 Gordon Cooper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 Jim Lovell and Frank Borman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 Dee O’Hara and Gene Cernan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Mike Collins and John Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .106 Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and George Low . . . . . . 121 Ted Freeman and Buzz Aldrin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Roger Chaffee, Ed White, and Jim McDivitt . . . . . . 143 Vladimir Komarov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Donn Eisele, Walt Cunningham, and Wally Schirra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Wally Schirra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Donn Eisele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242 Georgi Beregovoi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 Vladimir Shatalov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Alexei Yeliseyev, Yevgeny Khrunov, Vladimir Shatalov, and Boris Volynov. . . . . . . . . . 265 The Apollo 7 and 8 crews at the White House, December 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .302 Bill Anders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324 Jim McDivitt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .360 Rusty Schweickart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .364 John Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 Charlie Duke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407

Foreword Thirty years ago, when I was identified as an astronaut, as often as not the first question I was asked was, “Which one are you?” I was asked that question hundreds of times but was only quick enough to come up with the best answer one time: “I’m this one!” Today, the same situation elicits “Did you fly in space?” and “What was your mission?” This happens because, except for John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and one or two others, the public sees us as generic heroes—a Mark IV, Mod 3 Astronaut. The media made us heroes at a time when we did not take ourselves all that seriously. When I was selected to be a nasa astronaut in late 1963, it was still the early days of spaceflight. Like it or not, we were instant celebrities or, more accurately, a celebrity’s celebrity. We were sought out and “collected” by politicians and Hollywood stars and never thought a whole lot about it. We were not terribly impressed by anyone else, but somehow or other they were frequently impressed to have an astronaut in the crowd. The public had many misconceptions about astronauts in those days, believing, for example, that there was an “astronaut diet” or an “astronaut physical fitness program.” We did have many academic classes the first couple of years of training, but the Mercury astronauts saw to it that they were all “gentleman’s courses”—not pressured by grades. The last thing in the world those guys wanted was to be measured side by side with anybody else who arrived later! Without such measurements, they were always at the top of the heap. There was an order of seniority in the astronaut office because we were all military-trained people. However, that was a whole lot less important than what I call the pecking order. The pecking order pretty much ignored military rank but had everything to do with whether you were a Mercury,

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Gemini, or Apollo astronaut. Even though the first thirty of us became pretty well integrated, there was always that pecking order—subject to the occasional exception. When exceptions occurred, it was usually due to a friend’s unfortunate death. The top astronauts forgot about the pecking order only rarely. What else was different in those days? Today’s astronauts may seem a bit underpaid for the job they do and the impressive way they do it, but their salaries look pretty good to me. When I went to work as an astronaut, in 1963, I earned a little over $13,000 a year. I once calculated that, during my Apollo 7 mission, I had earned the great sum of $660. But we weren’t doing it for the money—nobody does a job like that for money. Any one of us would have paid nasa to have the job! I do recall being just a little chagrined when I first learned what I was going to be paid, and thinking, “You know, if it was so hard to get this job and so many people wanted it, wasn't it worth maybe a bit more than $13,000 a year?” Something else we did not have and were unable to obtain in those days was life insurance. The second year I was there, we thought we might get coverage when nasa went out for quotes to renew the agency’s health and accident policy. They actually solicited two quotes. Insurers had to submit one bid with the thirty astronauts included for death benefits and another bid if we were not covered. The difference was, apparently, quite significant because nasa, bless its sweet little heart, accepted the bid with astronauts not included! None of us planned to collect any life insurance, even though we did not always deserve our reputations as impeccable aviators. It turns out we had just about the same kind of safety record as active-duty military pilots. Most of our accidents were “pilot error”—that is just the way it is with military flying. We lost a lot more astronauts in t-38s back then than we ever did in spacecraft. By 1965 our program was beginning to roll, but the Soviet Union had already laid claim to many space firsts. In four short years they had launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin, followed by Gherman Titov, the first person to spend a full day in orbit. They also became the first nation to launch simultaneous flights: Vostok 3, with Andrian Nikolayev on board, followed a day later by Vostok 4, carrying Pavel Popovich into space. The following

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year Valery Bykovsky and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, repeated that successful tandem mission. nasa was hard on their heels. We launched Alan Shepard three weeks after Yuri Gagarin's epic journey, and although Shepard’s flight and the following one by Gus Grissom were short, suborbital missions, they got us in the game. It wasn't until John Glenn’s flight in February 1962 that the United States began to match the Russians by orbiting humans. The Mercury flights of Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper narrowed the gap in what was being called the “space race,” before the Soviets once again surprised the world with the first three-person flight. A full four years before the first flight of the three-man Apollo spacecraft, which I would fly, Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov orbited the Earth together aboard the first Voskhod spacecraft. Americans seem to rise to the occasion when they find themselves in a race; we just naturally want to win. However, this was not just a race. It was a clash of cultures, systems of government, and a challenge to our way of life. We felt threatened! For the first time in a hundred years, we faced the fact that not only were we not the best at everything in the world, we were not even as good at some things. We were suddenly shocked into doing something. As 1965 got under way the Soviet Union achieved another notable milestone: a flight featuring the first spacewalk. With the successful conclusion of this mission by Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev, the Russians appeared to be well ahead. However, we were about to launch the first Gemini mission. This impressive and relatively cheap program soon narrowed the gap. As we launched Gemini missions, the Russians were busy creating a whole new generation of spacecraft known as Soyuz. Its birth would not be an easy one. Sadly, along the way, each nation lost some of its best spacefarers. In my first five years at nasa, we lost seven of the thirty people in our group in aircraft and spacecraft accidents. In the thirty-eight years since, we have only lost five more members of that group. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died aboard their Apollo 1 spacecraft during a launch-pad fire in January 1967, and the Soviets grieved the loss of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov when Soyuz 1 slammed into the ground following a parachute failure just three months later. Their respective countries

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mourned them as national heroes. Those of us who knew them as friends and knew their wives and children suffered a far more personal loss. It was my job to fly the next mission into space, a mission with great significance if we were going to reach the moon “before the end of the decade.” I felt fortunate to be on the backup crew for Apollo 1 and then to be able to fly the first manned Apollo mission. I know that all those getting ready to fly the next mission in line feel exactly the same way. By the time I was ending my tenure as chief of the Skylab Branch of the astronaut office, working on designing America’s first space station, the moon race was well and truly over. When Skylab launched in 1973, humans had already visited our moon for the last time that century. I would love to have made that journey myself, but sadly it was not to be. The space race seems a long time ago, now that we have Russians and Americans orbiting together on a space station. (Now people usually refer to me simply as an “ancient astronaut.”) In some ways, the space race between the two nations continues, except now it looks more like a fight for money than national prestige. In the 1960s it was easy to understand the Russians. We truly were in a space race, and we were hollering, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” We did not know that across the sea, the Russians were saying, “Hey! The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming!” They were doing it for precisely the same reasons: to generate public support and keep the funding up for their program. The Russians were truly in a race with us to land a man on the moon. As we started out behind them getting into space, the Russians made their commitment to go to the moon probably a bit after us. And they did not give up for a long time. I began to meet and socialize with cosmonauts around 1968, and I have come to know many of them reasonably well. Most of them were just like us, hard-charging guys. Even those who were civilians struck me as having a military background. Even though we always got along with the cosmonauts very well as individuals, I have always been critical of the Russian programs and the people who negotiated the deals with us. Today, the public pretty much takes space for granted. Most of the time, I really cannot blame them—it’s part of the American character. A couple of times a year I go down to the Visitor Center at the Kennedy Space Center and talk to kids. If I ask how many of them want to be an astronaut, I

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get some hands. In the old days everyone wanted to be an astronaut; everybody would raise his or her hand. It is not like it used to be. But every once in a while something comes along, like the Columbia disaster, and all of a sudden the public is grabbed right by the heart. Death awakens us from our complacency, and we realize again that spaceflight is a very dangerous profession. It is a profession that should be pursued by professionals. One thing today is as true as it was back in the 1960s—those who fly into space for both nations care less about the politics than they do about getting the job done. As this book shows, we are a rather diverse group of people with very different personal stories. About the only thing we all have in common is that, at one time or another, we each took that walk out to the launch pad, strapped ourselves on top of a powerful rocket, and readied ourselves for the experience of a lifetime. I hope you enjoy getting to know us as individuals in the pages of this book. Walter Cunningham nasa Astronaut, Apollo 7

Acknowledgments It would not have been possible to write a book containing so many personal stories without the full assistance and cooperation of a number of key participants in the space program. Many have been interviewed hundreds of times over the decades; others have chosen never to tell their stories in this form before. Yet in each case they sat down with the authors and offered fresh, insightful perspectives into their lives and space careers with openness and patience. In numerous cases they also took the time to invite us into their homes and their confidences despite demanding schedules, and made introductions to others. Our primary thanks must go to the spacefarers, both Russian and American, who generously gave their time and help so willingly. For their invaluable assistance, our thanks go to Buzz Aldrin, Valery Bykovksy, Mike Collins, Konstantin Feoktistov, Valeri Kubasov, Alexei Leonov, Jim Lovell, Pam Melroy, Ed Mitchell, Pavel Popovich, Jack Schmitt, Valentina Tereshkova, Al Worden, and Alexei Yeliseyev. Dick Gordon also kindly allowed us to fully use an interview we had previously conducted with him. Some spacefarers went even further in their assistance, in ways that we could never have expected. Bill and Valerie Anders, Scott Carpenter, Gene Cernan, Walt and Dot Cunningham, Charlie Duke, Wally and Jo Schirra, Rusty Schweickart, and Tom Stafford not only provided extensive interviews, but also very helpfully proofread and made valuable amendments to the book. In many cases, this process uncovered stories long forgotten by the spacefarers themselves, which appear here in print for the very first time. Our special thanks to Suzi Cooper and her late husband, Gordon Cooper, who was also very generous with interview time. Sadly, Gordon passed away shortly after receiving some final drafts from this book, which he had helped with and agreed to proofread.

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As indicated by this book’s dedication, those who stay behind on the ground are often just as vital as those who get to go on a spaceflight, and this proved to be the case when researching and writing the book. Key interviews and some valuable editorial suggestions were made by spaceflight notables and family members Jeannie Bassett, Sam Beddingfield, Howard Benedict, Cece Bibby, W. O. Brown, Harriet Eisele, Susie Eisele Black, Wally Funk, Don Gregory, Gerry Griffin, Paul Haney, Jack King, Gene Kranz, Lola Morrow, Dale Myers, Dee O’Hara, Milt Radimer, Harvey Renshaw Jr., Kris Stoever, Teddy Taylor, Al Tinnirello, Hank Waddell, and Guenter Wendt. In some cases, the events we discussed were controversial, even personally painful at times, and we are most grateful that the participants found this project important enough for the story to be told correctly. Those who truly know their space history are few and far between, so we were most grateful that some expert researchers were so willing to help with this project. Our thanks therefore go to Rick Boos, Tod Bryant, Jim Busby, and Robert Pearlman. Photo researcher Jody Russell at the Johnson Space Center Media Resource Center; Sharon Thomas of the Florida Museum of Natural History; and Shelly Kelly, a University of Houston archivist, were also very helpful in tracking down photographs and longoverlooked documentation. Others who provided much-needed assistance were Kate Doolan, Kerrie Dougherty, Elena Esina, Ed Hengeveld, and David J. Shayler. Erin French provided repeated and meticulous proofreading, and Sonia Lopez assisted in reproducing old photographs. Particular thanks must go to noted space historians Mike Cassutt, John B. Charles, and former British Interplanetary Society president Rex Hall, mbe. They each gave a good deal of their time to read over each book chapter, providing insights that considerably sharpened the final drafts. We extend our sincere gratitude for their expert help and enduring friendships. Another worthy contributor was spaceflight historian Bert Vis, whose extensive interview archive and helpful advice provided the authors with numerous personal quotations and newly emerging facts from the early days of the Soviet space program. The authors would also like to acknowledge the skills of copyeditor Paul Bodine, whose subtle changes have sharpened the focus of this work. We also appreciate the support and encouragement of the entire team at the

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University of Nebraska Press, particularly that of Director Gary Dunham and former assistant managing editor Linnea Fredrickson. This book is a tribute to the welcome assistance of all those named above and several other contributors, each of whom lent a willing hand. The authors could not have undertaken nor completed this project without their enthusiastic help and support.

1. Gemini Raises the Bar With silent, lifting mind I’ve trod, the high untrespassed sanctity of space. John Gillespie Magee

By the end of July 1961 Gus Grissom knew that, barring unforeseen circumstances, he would not fly again in the Mercury program. One of America's original Mercury 7 astronauts, Grissom had just commanded his country's second manned space mission. The flight went well until the very end, when the hatch of Liberty Bell 7 unexpectedly blew off, and the spacecraft was lost to the ocean. In his autobiography, Schirra’s Space, fellow Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra recalled that Grissom now felt he had something to prove. “He was angry about being blamed for his spacecraft having sunk, and he was fighting to come back out of the pack. Gus was a tiger. He wanted the first Gemini flight, and by God he got it.” Gemini, the two-person spacecraft that would follow the solo Mercury missions, was a good place for Grissom to focus. With his astronaut colleagues all waiting their turn to fly, Grissom was now at the back of the line. “When Gus finished his Mercury flight, he knew he was out of the loop because we had to go through the seven,” Schirra reflected. “And he looked at it and said, ‘My God, we are not going to have that many flights. I’m going up to St. Louis and play with Gemini.’ So it was essentially his spacecraft. He practically had it to himself.” Grissom subsequently began working closely with the engineers at McDonnell’s St. Louis plant, offering the advice of a flown astronaut as they designed the two-man spacecraft. It was an opportunity they had not been given with the smaller Mercury

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craft, apart from some suggested modifications, and Grissom threw himself into the task with his usual determination and expertise. “Since we had to fly the beast,” he said prior to the flight, “we want one that will do the best possible job.” On the whole, the engineers were pleased to have Grissom’s input. On the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dr. Robert Gilruth had revealed plans for the development of a two-person spacecraft. Just a month later, Alex P. Nagy from nasa headquarters in Washington gave an eminently appropriate name to the project: Gemini. Nagy’s suggested title quickly caught on, and it stuck. In an astrological sense, Gemini was named after a constellation that includes the twin stars of Castor and Pollux, and it is a sign of the zodiac controlled by Mercury. Within its spheres of influence are the qualities of adaptability and mobility—two major objectives of Project Gemini. A circumspect Gus Grissom would later write that “those of us who had become involved with Gemini were beginning to suspect that we’d got, not twins, but a tiger by the tail.” Gemini was seen as a necessary bridge between the pioneering Mercury flights, which primitively tested the adaptability of humans to spaceflight, and the Apollo program, which was designed to send astronauts to the moon and return them to the Earth. Grissom would also draw his own automotive analogy. “Gemini’s a Corvette,” he reflected. “Mercury was a Volkswagen.” The Gemini astronauts would in effect open the doorway to a moon landing—an event not measured then in decades, but in a mere handful of years. They would not only conduct long-duration missions as a necessary precursor to the lunar voyages, but also experiment with the complex techniques of rendezvous and conducting docking maneuvers in Earth orbit. Over Gemini’s twenty-month duration there would be twenty available seats going into orbit. As one Gemini astronaut would describe the program and its list of challenging objectives, it was “test pilot heaven.” Externally, the two-person Gemini vehicle was very similar to the Mercury spacecraft. However, it weighed almost twice as much, and being a foot wider and longer created an overall increase in size of some 20 percent. The most dramatic difference in the spacecraft itself was an increase of 50 percent in its interior volume, which would permit two astronauts to occupy it for flights of up to two weeks’ duration.

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In every sense it was a pilot’s spacecraft. Although 220 dials, switches, and levers surrounded the two astronauts, all of them were within easy reach, while strategically placed mirrors allowed them to view and operate other controls located behind them. The astronauts could also exit the craft while in orbit through two hinged hatches. It was all part of the planning process: the Titan boosters that would carry the three-ton spacecraft aloft used combustible fuel instead of the highly explosive propellant that had fed the Atlas rockets, which allowed designers to dispense with the heavy, rocket-propelled escape towers previously used in Mercury flights. “The weight saved could be put to good use in the spacecraft,” Grissom observed in his book, Gemini. Having larger hatches was also critically important if a catastrophic situation developed on the launch pad or in early flight. Once a rapid evacuation had been decided upon the hatches would fly open in milliseconds, while ejection seats would simultaneously blast the two crew members out and away from their spacecraft. Another feature of Gemini was the white, one-ton adapter section located at the rear of the spacecraft. Essentially a harmonizing collar between the craft and the Titan booster, the section also housed sixteen small rockets for orbital maneuvering, containers of oxygen, and batteries for electrical power. This adapter section, its job done, would be jettisoned just prior to reentry, exposing the spacecraft’s retrorockets and heat shield. In discussing developing plans for Project Gemini at a press conference, nasa’s Director of Manned Space Flight, Dr. H. Brainerd Holmes, explained that the changes were important, “for they will allow us to put manned space flight on more of an operational basis, as opposed to the research and development effort that is involved in Project Mercury. They are the same changes that are generally found when we compare a first prototype aircraft with its later production version.” The Martin Company’s Titan II had essentially been designed as a ballistic missile; in fact, it was the most powerful Cold War booster ever developed by the United States, capable of carrying an enormous warhead measured in tens of megatons of thermonuclear energy. This mighty booster’s first stage would develop around 430,000 pounds of thrust—some 65,000 pounds more than the Atlases that would launch four American astronauts into orbit during Project Mercury—while the second stage would produce an additional 100,000 pounds of thrust.

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Unlike the Atlas and other boosters of that era, the Titan II did not burn liquid oxygen or kerosene. Instead, it was powered by highly toxic hypergolic propellants: room-temperature fuels and oxidizers that spontaneously and violently ignited on contact with each other in the rocket's combustion chamber. The one truly strange thing that happened to the Gemini craft and its interior fittings during their development was that they began to be fashioned around Gus Grissom—one of the smallest of the astronauts. Later, taller astronauts would have problems squeezing into the same space and using the same apparatus designed for Grissom’s compact frame. He told Life magazine that “When the other [astronauts] started looking at the Gemini mock-up, it was pretty clear it was designed around me.” In fact, this became so evident that the astronauts began to call the Gemini spacecraft “The Gusmobile.” Fellow astronaut John Young, who would be assigned to the first mission with Grissom, reflected the feeling of the others: “Gus really had a big hand in everything,” he said, “from the way the cockpit was laid out to what instruments went where. It was his baby.” Grissom demanded a lot of himself, especially as Gemini came with the accountability of command. “I was responsible for my own skin in my Mercury flight,” he said at the time. “But now that I’m going up for my second flight and have John in that co-pilot’s seat, I’m responsible for two. This will mean some of the decisions may come a little harder, but I’ve asked for the responsibility and I’ve got it.” In most of John Young’s photos, past and present, he generally looks detached and unsmiling. Yet those who know him say that although the former navy pilot might seem aloof, he actually possesses a lively, very dry wit. Blink and you might miss it, but it is there. At various times he has been described as a loner, an adventurer, and a mechanical genius, with a curious dislike for the great outdoors. “John is an amusing bundle of such contradictions,” his first wife Barbara once commented. Fellow astronaut Michael Collins would also describe his colleague as “Mysterious. The epitome of the non-hero, with a country boy’s ‘aw shucks—t’ain’t nothing’ demeanor, which masks a delightful wit

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and a keen engineer’s mind.” nasa managers, in their first technical meetings with the rookie astronaut, were regularly thrown by his demeanor. At first Young would sit in silence, absorbing the opinions being offered, and the others attending would assume he had nothing of importance to add. Then, toward the end of the meeting, Young would gently make a point so devastatingly precise that they would realize he was ahead of them all. He would have summarized all the key points and seen another that they had all missed. He was rarely underestimated twice. Just a week shy of his thirty-second birthday and then a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, Young was named as one of nasa’s second group of astronauts. He had not been eligible for consideration in the first Mercury group, as he was still a student at test-pilot school. John Watts Young was born in San Francisco on 24 September 1930 to parents William Hugh and Wanda (née Howland). He was less than two years old when the family moved east—first to his father’s birthplace of Cartersville, Georgia, where his younger brother, Hugh, was born in 1933. The future astronaut began his education at Cherokee Avenue School in 1935, and while his father looked for work he and his brother lived with their aunt, who remembered his childhood fascination with airplanes and model trains. She would later write of her nephew that “He has a brilliant mind with amazing concentration. John is a very reserved and private person completely absorbed and happy in his space work.” The following year his father found a new job in Orlando, Florida, but it would be some three years before the family moved there permanently, and into their own home. Young, now nine years old, and his brother were enrolled at Princeton Elementary School. Then, during World War II, his father served as a navy commander, flying patrols over the Pacific. Young’s interest in aviation continued through his high school years, both at Memorial Junior High School and later at Orlando High. According to his father, he also “used to draw pictures of airplanes and rockets all the time.” One of Young’s former high school classmates recalls that “in the eleventh grade everybody had to make a talk on something. . . . John chose rockets.” Academically, he had little difficulty in high school, breezing through with straight As. Football proved a handy release from the strictures of study, and Young also became a promising track athlete. A member of

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the National Honor Society, he graduated in 1948 and was awarded the faculty's highest senior class honor, the Guernsey Good Citizenship Cup. Young received an rotc scholarship and enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He subsequently earned a magna cum laude degree in aeronautical engineering from the institute in 1952, finishing second in his class, and received a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. A temporary assignment as fire control officer aboard the Fletcher Class destroyer uss Laws followed, and even though he bore the fledgling rank of ensign Young seems to have made a lasting impression on people. One of those who served with him, Joseph LaMantia, recalls Young as being “the most respected officer on the ship.” His next assignment was to attend basic flight training school in Pensacola, Florida, and in 1954 he won his wings. An advanced six-month flying course was followed by four years’ duty on the carriers Coral Sea and Forrestal, flying tf-9d Cougars and f-8d Crusaders with the 103rd Fighter Squadron. During this exciting period Young married Barbara White of Savannah, Georgia, with whom he would eventually have two children— daughter Sandy, born in 1957, and a son, also named John, born two years later. “John started out in the black-shoe Navy,” Grissom wrote with dry humor in his autobiography, using the term for navy personnel who were not naval aviators, “and I never let him forget his destroyer days. After switching to flying, he set a world time-to-climb record in 1953, during Project High Jump.” In fact, as a test pilot, Young set world “time-toclimb” records for both three thousand and twenty-five thousand feet in a navy f-4h-1 Phantom II fighter aircraft. Prior to his astronaut selection in 1962, he had accumulated an impressive record as a navy test pilot, instructor, and project evaluation officer, with around thirty-two hundred flying hours to his credit, including nearly twenty-seven hundred in jet airplanes. As Young told the Washington Evening Star newspaper in 1965, “I left the best job in the Navy to get the best job in the world.” “John’s not what you’d call the talkative type,” Grissom later recalled of his Gemini copilot, “but he’s got a good solid sense of humor, which is a prerequisite in this space business. It’s a bit unusual and takes you a while to catch on to, but he knows how to ease the strain. Without humor, you’re in a bad way when the glitches come.” Neither Grissom nor Young were

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known for wasting words, and as they continued their mission training they were regarded as well matched. As the first non-Mercury astronaut to get a confirmed prime crew assignment, Young seemed in fact to imitate his commander down to the tiniest detail. Both quietly absorbed themselves in the engineering details of the mission. When reporters tried to ask them questions about themselves, they would get a reply about machinery instead. It was the way the two astronauts wanted it. Neither man cared much for the publicity, and would rather have been quietly discussing the latest simulator run together than responding to reporters’ questions. In one aspect of the mission the crew seemed almost willfully intent on derailing nasa’s publicity plans. Tradition demanded that the spacecraft receive a name, and this privilege fell to Grissom as commander of the vehicle. His first idea was to name it after an Indian tribe from the area in Indiana where he was born, and he and John agreed that the name Wapasha was appealing. Then someone suggested that the press would probably tongue in cheek call it the “Wabash Cannon Ball,” after a popular railthemed country song. At the time, Grissom’s father was working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and he didn’t want to impose that burden on him. “How would he explain that one to his pals on the B&O?” Grissom later reflected. Then he had a devilish notion, inspired by the name of the popular Broadway show and movie The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Harking back to the loss of his Mercury spacecraft Liberty Bell 7, Grissom began to feel Molly Brown might be a perfect choice. Once again, John Young agreed, so their Gemini craft was named after the Titanic survivor portrayed in the musical. “Some of my bosses were amused;” Grissom recalled, “some weren’t.” A couple of those who didn’t like the name asked the unrepentant astronaut what his second choice might be, thinking he may have a better option. His second choice, he told them, was Titanic. “Nobody was amused, so Molly Brown it was.” In hindsight, Deke Slayton could hardly have selected a better crew for Gemini 3. It was essentially a “shakedown” flight, as pilots liked to call it, which called for the crew to exercise the spacecraft’s orbital attitude and maneuvering system. This system was crucial to the planned rendezvous and docking flights that would later be attempted. Another of their vital tasks was to attempt a controlled reentry using an on-board computer. “In

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comparison with some of the later missions,” Grissom once wrote, “ours was what John Young would describe as ‘a piece of cake.’ But John and I had practically lived with our spacecraft since the first rivet was put in it at the McDonnell plant. We had studied every one of its systems as each was installed, and sweated out the glitches along with the McDonnell engineers. So we had the vital ingredient of confidence going for us all the way.” Originally, the first manned Gemini mission was scheduled for December 1964—America's only manned flight planned for that year. Then the postponement of a critical test flight and the forces of nature brought about a lengthy delay. The second precursor flight, designated Gemini 2 and scheduled for 6 October, involved launching an unmanned Gemini craft out over the Atlantic to demonstrate reentry techniques and recovery systems. On 17 August the Titan II booster being readied for the task was damaged by lightning as it stood on the launch pad. Later, as a precautionary measure, the second stage was removed and placed under shelter when Hurricane Cleo began advancing on the Cape. The first stage remained on the pad but was firmly battened down. After Cleo, another two hurricanes began moving in, so the first stage was also lifted from the pad and moved to a safe area. nasa’s associate administrator for manned spaceflight, Dr. George Mueller, announced that these factors had combined to eliminate the slim possibility of a manned launch that year, and he confirmed that the launch would take place no sooner than February or March. The Titan II test flight eventually left the pad on 19 January, culminating in the recovery of the automatically piloted spacecraft by crews from the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain an hour and forty-four minutes after liftoff. The craft splashed down only twenty-four miles short of its intended target after a journey of 2,126 miles. A jubilant Gus Grissom said the almost-faultless trial had left a “clear road ahead” to the flight he and John Young would conduct just a few weeks later. At a news conference held in a giant assembly room of the Martin Company plant in Baltimore, Grissom was full of praise for the specific rocket that would carry them into space. “This Titan is the cleanest booster that has gone through all its tests—cleaner than any booster flown to date,” he said with conviction. “Very definitely, Titan is go!” One aspect of their spacecraft that never really sat well with the crew was

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the ejection system, intended to save them in the event of a booster catastrophe at launch or in early flight. As Young watched one test of the system, his hope turned to dismay when the hatch failed to open as planned. The ejection seat fired and plowed straight into the hatch. Such an event would have proved fatal, or, as Young dryly put it later, “One hell of a headache—but a short one!” On 5 February, Molly Brown was slowly trundled out to Launch Complex 19 and carefully hoisted into position atop the ninety-foot Titan II launch vehicle. Three days later, in yet another positive move for the Gemini program, nasa announced that Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and rookie Charles “Pete” Conrad had been selected to fly the Gemini 5 mission, then planned for September. With a provisional launch date of 23 March to work toward, the two Gemini 3 astronauts stepped up their training. They worked well together. Young admired his commander's experience and dedication to the task at hand, while Grissom took a liking to his copilot’s pragmatic enthusiasm, engineering skills, and wry humor. “Until we joined up for this flight,” Grissom said of him, “I didn’t know John Young any better than any of the others in their group. They’re all talented. In fact, when one of them comes up with a new answer for some problem, I think they are a lot smarter than our original group of seven. By launch time John and I will know each other pretty well. We take a note book with us into the flight simulator . . . and jot down all the problem areas. Then at night we sit down . . . and talk things over, deciding who does what.” Nothing was going to prevent Gus Grissom from making this flight— not even a possible fracture in his arm. Within weeks of launch, he hit a door with his hand during a relaxed function in the Bahamas, and according to his wife, Betty, “apparently broke a bone in his left wrist.” Almost immediately the wrist began to swell up, and he had to strap it tightly with a plastic bandage. Somehow he managed to keep it a secret and worked privately on the wrist to bring the swelling down before launch date. He knew very well that if anyone found out it could easily have caused him, or both crew members, to be replaced. “Gus was never entirely sure the wrist was broken,” Betty Grissom later revealed in her book, Starfall, “because he did not consult a doctor, at nasa or anywhere.” As launch day approached, the crew’s training included a full sevenhour countdown simulation inside their spacecraft on the launch pad. The

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test was deliberately halted just one minute before the theoretical liftoff. Even though several minor problems had emerged, officials declared the trial launch a success. Then, on 17 March, just six days before Molly Brown was due to fly, the Soviet Union dropped a sickening bombshell. Voskhod 2 was launched into orbit, and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made a historic spacewalk. The timing was clearly aimed at stealing nasa’s thunder, and it gave the space agency quite a jolt. When asked the seemingly inescapable question about where this latest feat placed nasa in the space race, officials calmly reacted by talking about Gemini’s elaborate and structured preparations, while politely downplaying what they claimed was a very obvious (and successful) instance of Soviet propaganda. At 9:24 a.m. on 23 March 1965, after a minor delay, the Titan II’s first stage erupted into life; nasa’s first manned Gemini mission had begun. The launch was later said to have been so smooth and relatively free of noise that neither Grissom nor Young realized the Titan had left the pad until CapCom Gordon Cooper reported “Bolts and liftoff!” Then they noticed that the mission elapsed-time clock was running. Less than half a minute after launch the two astronauts once again heard Cooper’s calm Oklahoma twang. “nasa never approved the name for the spacecraft,” Cooper later recalled, “but I gave it my official approval by calling to Gus and John, ‘You’re on your way, Molly Brown.’ ” Grissom responded with an enthusiastic, “Yeah, man!” Spectators on the ground watched as the Titan II rocket arced into a startlingly blue sky with a deep, thunderous roar. Witnesses to the launch were amazed that there was no fiery contrail as in earlier Atlas liftoffs due to the use of hypergolic fuel in the booster. Two minutes after liftoff, Flight Control reported, “everything looking well” as the Titan reached a speed of 3,000 miles an hour and the crew prepared for staging. “Staging is really something,” John Young said of the event. “It’s called ‘fire in the hole’ because you fire the second stage engine before you get rid of the first stage. [It] blew out everything and fire came all around the vehicle and you could see it. That was a surprise to me. But it is only momentary, and with the second stage firing you get right out of there.” As the second stage kicked in and the spent first stage dropped away, acceleration increased dramatically. Flight Director Chris Kraft gave the

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crew a tentative “go.” Soon the spacecraft was approaching an orbital speed of 17,500 miles an hour. Flight Control continued to report that all systems were functioning well, while Grissom confirmed “everything fine” within the spacecraft. He had good reason to feel fine himself, as he had just become the first person ever to fly into space a second time. It was an occasion not lost on him. At 9:30 a.m., just six minutes after liftoff from the Cape, the Titan's empty second stage fell away, and Molly Brown slid gracefully into orbit over Bermuda. The first manned Gemini craft had achieved an elliptical orbit of 87 by 125 miles above the Earth. This was slightly higher than planned, and resulted from a better-than-expected performance of the Titan II booster. Shortly after, while Grissom was busy verifying the parameters of their orbit with Mission Control, the crew was suddenly faced with indications of a potentially life-threatening problem. Grissom would later describe this situation by saying “all hell broke loose.” Young, however, was straight onto it and calmly reported that the fault was in the oxygen system, causing mixed instrument readings. He knew his spacecraft backward and forward, and much to Grissom’s relief his copilot had soon diagnosed the problem as an electrical failure. Young promptly switched to a backup unit and reported that the instrument readings had returned to normal. Grissom, who had hastily lowered the visor on his helmet at the first sign of trouble, flipped it back up and resumed his duties. Grissom also reported that the spacecraft was experiencing a slight yaw drift to the left, but it was never considered a serious anomaly, and was eventually found to have been caused by a venting water boiler. Seated at his CapCom console in Muchea, Western Australia, Pete Conrad relayed some happy news to his fellow astronauts: Kraft had given them the okay to continue for at least a second orbit. At 10:58 a.m., just before Molly Brown entered that second orbit, Grissom fired the two forward thrusting Orbit Attitude and Maneuvering System (oams) rockets, which effectively reduced the elliptical orbit to an almost circular one of 105 by 97 miles. Constantly issuing updated bulletins on the mission, public affairs officer Paul Haney announced news of the operation. “This is Gemini Control,” he reported. “Within the last five seconds the Molly Brown, Gemini 3, spacecraft has completed the transitional maneuver by firing their forward-firing thrusters, eighty-five pounds each, for some

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seventy-five seconds. The maneuver has apparently been a successful one, demonstrating the extraordinary steering capability of this spacecraft.” It was more than just “successful”—for nasa it was an outstanding triumph. For the first time ever the flight path of a spacecraft had been manually altered by a pilot in orbit. As Flight Director Chris Kraft later put it, “We’d just crossed a major milestone on the way to the moon.” And there was more to come. Young, as copilot, had not only operated the first computer on a manned spacecraft, but had also been entrusted with several experiments during the four-plus hours of the mission, with Grissom assisting. Samples of human blood needed to be irradiated, and sea urchin eggs were meant to be fertilized to gauge their reaction to weightlessness. The latter experiment did not quite go as planned, however. As Grissom later related in his book Gemini, it was a “pathetically simple” experiment, and all he had to do “was turn a knob, which would actuate a mechanism” to fertilize the eggs. “Maybe, after our oxygen scare, I had too much adrenalin pumping,” he wrote, “but I twisted that handle so hard I broke it off.” Much to his amusement he would later learn that a ground controller, who was simultaneously duplicating the experiment on the ground, had snapped off his handle in exactly the same way. Young, meanwhile, was testing a new array of water-reconstituted food items such as dried beef pot roast, orange and grapefruit juice, brownies, chicken, and apple sauce. With a few minutes to spare before the next maneuver—the most critical of their flight—Young sprang a small surprise on his commander when he slipped out a carefully wrapped corned-beefon-rye sandwich from a pocket in the leg of his spacesuit. It was a parting gift that that Wally Schirra had furtively handed to him with a sly wink just before hatch closure. “I catered that,” Schirra has since admitted. “I got the sandwich at Wolfie’s, a deli near the Cape, the day before. It was refrigerated all night so it was perfectly safe; we ate that food all the time.” Young offered the sandwich to Grissom, who was feeling hungry, and he took it with a big smile. “It was no big deal,” Young later said of the incident. “The horizon sensors weren’t working right so I gave this sandwich to Gus so he could relax. There was nothing he could do in the dark to make that thing work until we got back into the daylight.” However, after taking two bites from

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the highly aromatic sandwich, Grissom realized that some loose crumbs (and the strong odor of corned beef ) had begun drifting around the cabin. He quickly rewrapped and packed it away in his pocket, and the two men soon forgot all about it. But others did not. That small prank would later cause nasa and the two astronauts a lot of grief when enraged congressional representatives came down hard on the space agency for allowing crew members to engage in activities that contravened strict health and safety regulations aboard a U.S. manned spacecraft. After lowering and circularizing their orbit, the crew of Molly Brown finally began the planned task of altering the spacecraft’s orbital plane. In other words, they would change the angle of their orbit compared to the Earth below by nudging the spacecraft laterally, using measured bursts from their small maneuvering rockets. It was not performed simply as an exercise in orbital aerobatics, however—it was a maneuver critical to future rendezvous missions between two spacecraft. The Mercury spacecraft could not do it, nor could Vostok and Voskhod—despite the Russians’ desire to give the public the impression that Soviet spacecraft had this ability. These primitive spacecraft, hurled into space by their boosters, could only turn to face in different directions before firing retrorockets to begin reentry. Their orbits were based solely on the accuracy of the booster that carried them into space, not by anything the spacecraft could do. It would be impossible to travel to the moon—or even to complete the remainder of the Gemini program—without being able to change orbit, and doing so was Gemini 3’s most vital task. The maneuver was begun by feeding data into the ship’s computer, which instructed the attitude control rockets to fire and rotate the spacecraft broadside to its flight path. Once this had been achieved Grissom fired the forward thrusters, propelling Molly Brown about a mile to the south, the craft’s orbit now canted slightly to the original flight path. Chris Kraft in Mission Control even allowed himself a smile. “All that theory about rendezvous was being converted to fact,” he later wrote of the accomplishment. A third orbital maneuver brought the low point or perigee of their orbit down to just fifty miles above the Earth, at which time Grissom jettisoned the adapter section and then fired the retrorockets to bring Molly Brown home. It had been a good day. Though the spacecraft had certainly incurred

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some small problems during its orbital checkouts—yaw drifts, oxygen readings—these were quite minor compared to the overall success of the first Gemini mission. The first true space vehicle, one that could truly travel in space rather than just pass through it, had all but completed its vigorous maiden voyage. “In the Liberty Bell 7 I was a man in a can, just along for the ride,” Grissom would later say. “Molly Brown, bless her heart, was a machine I could maneuver.” In fact, Grissom was so elated by the smooth performance of the spacecraft that he even permitted Young to fly it for a few minutes—something that most commanders allowed only with great reluctance. “It was a really good mission,” Young told a later press conference. “Gus performed more than twelve different experiments in the three orbits—he did a really great job. I don’t think he really got enough credit for the great job he did. He proved that the vehicle would do all the things needed to stay up there for fourteen days.” As reentry began, Grissom noticed that the onboard computer was indicating that they would splash down a little short of their target, so he manually banked Molly Brown, first to the left and then the right, in order to bring the spacecraft down a little closer to the waiting fleet of recovery ships. Hurtling backward toward Earth, John Young was entranced by the vividness of what he was seeing. “The first thing you notice is at about six and one-half minutes after retro fire a slight orange haze that envelops the spacecraft. And this haze layer increases and changes colors to a dark green. It’s a very beautiful thing. And then orange sparks of ablative material start flying forward.” He also reported at the postflight news conference that their reentry through the atmosphere was so fiery that “at one point over Florida I could see the path we left as we came down; . . . it was long, funnel shaped.” It would later be discovered that the seventeen hundred degrees of heat encountered in this phase had actually melted away one of the layers of the protective heat shield. There was a bad surprise in store for the two crew members when the main parachute deployed. It snapped open so violently that they were both thrown against their hatch windows. Grissom hit his helmet’s faceplate so hard on a windshield mounting bracket that it was punctured, while Young’s faceplate was scratched. Just as they were recovering from that, the spacecraft plunged into the Atlantic. Molly Brown splashed down four hours and forty-five minutes after launch, having completed three Earth

John Young (left) and Gus Grissom on the recovery helicopter transporting them to the carrier uss Intrepid after their successful Gemini 3 mission. Courtesy nasa.

orbits. Grissom was naturally keeping a close watch on his window and wondering why he could see blue water. For a few moments memories of Liberty Bell 7 came flooding back to him, and he later revealed that his first thought was “Oh my God, here we go again!” Then he realized he had not severed the parachute, which was acting like a large sea anchor and dragging them across the water. He reached out and triggered the quick-release mechanism, and Molly Brown suddenly swung upright, just as planned. As they waited for the recovery team from the uss Intrepid to pick them up, the inside of the craft, which was pitching and tossing in a heavy, five-foot swell, quickly became extremely hot and stuffy. Both men were becoming increasingly queasy with the rolling motion. After enduring this for a short time they elected to remove their spacesuits—not an easy task in the confines of the spacecraft. Then, to his great consternation, Grissom became physically ill. Somehow Young was able to keep himself from following suit. “Gemini may be a good spacecraft,” Young would later grouse, “but she’s a lousy ship!” Helicopters from Intrepid had arrived on the scene only three minutes after splashdown, but the carrier itself was some fifty miles away. Grissom

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and Young elected to remain in Molly Brown until the Intrepid was much closer. Meanwhile, a pararescue team had been dropped nearby in order to secure a flotation collar around the spacecraft. An hour after splashdown Grissom finally opened his hatch and scrambled out into a waiting life raft. He would say that he was the first to depart “because my hatch was the only one fully out of the water and could be opened without danger of flooding the cabin.” John Young followed, and would later wryly observe that it was the first time he’d ever seen a captain leave his ship first. The two men were then hauled up into a recovery helicopter and transported to the Intrepid. Ninety minutes after Grissom and Young arrived safely aboard Intrepid, another helicopter gently lowered Molly Brown onto the deck of the carrier. The astronauts quickly found that they had hit the water some fifty-eight miles from the planned area, but this was later attributed to the spacecraft’s failure to develop quite as much lift as expected while Grissom was flying it back to Earth. It also seems Grissom’s injured wrist had not caused him any problems, as both men quickly passed the postflight medical checkup. Despite their post-splashdown nausea, the two astronauts were ecstatic over their flight. Grissom would later say, “I do know that if nasa had asked John and me to take Molly Brown back into space the day after splashdown, we would have done it with pleasure. She flew like a queen, did our unsinkable Molly Brown, and we were absolutely sure that her sister craft would perform as well.” Even the normally taciturn Young found it hard to describe his first experience of spaceflight during the postflight news conference. “It was incredible; it was unbelievable,” he enthused. “There are no words in the English language to describe the beauty of it. Man—I was impressed!” Reporters commented that the formerly gruff astronauts were now ad-libbing like a pair of comedians. “I think zero-g flight could make an extrovert out of anybody,” Young conceded. The flight of Gemini 3 also marked something of a milestone in America’s space program, as the last flight controlled from the Cape. Virtually from the time Molly Brown left the pad, new mission facilities at Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center had assumed control of the flight, as they would for those that followed.

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For Young, one unfortunate legacy of his first spaceflight has been enduring questions about that corned beef sandwich. He has always regarded the incident as an innocent prank. Decades after the flight he still shakes his head and frowns in disbelief whenever the subject is raised by reporters in lieu of a legitimate, technical question. He was certainly hauled over the coals at the time, he admits, but it did not affect or hurt his astronaut career in any way. It was not considered a harmless prank at the time, however. As Paul Haney recalls, “Jim Webb was furious. He held up a promotion Grissom had coming, and minimized the crew’s post-flight Washington celebration to a quick visit to Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s office in the Capitol. Not so much as a drive-by of the White House.” Grissom also typically shrugged off the incident. “After the flight our superiors at nasa let us know in no uncertain terms that any non-manrated corned beef sandwiches were out for future space missions. But John’s deadpan offer of this strictly non-authorized goodie remains one of the highlights of the flight for me.” In fact, after the flight, John Young cheekily enshrined the remains of the notorious sandwich in a small plastic container, which he kept on his desk, alongside the official letter of reprimand. On a far more positive note, the flight of Molly Brown gave Project Gemini the start it needed: a near-perfect test flight that admirably demonstrated the capabilities of the new generation of American spacecraft. Both astronauts were feted for their accomplishments on the short, low-orbit flight, and Grissom accepted this praise with good grace. “I think I can understand the outpouring of good will John and I received for our relatively easy flight,” he said after their mission. “After all the Russian spectaculars, the United States was back in the manned space flight business with probably the most sophisticated spacecraft in the world.” Following their successful Gemini 3 mission, Grissom began looking ahead to yet another generation of American spacecraft—Apollo. Young, meantime, was not finished with Project Gemini. He would soon be assigned to a far more complex mission on Gemini 10, this time with Group 3 astronaut Michael Collins. For many years, in fact decades, John Young would actually be nasa’s most experienced astronaut, with a six-mission record that was not broken until 2002 by shuttle astronaut Jerry Ross. John

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Young once summed up his lengthy astronaut career very succinctly: “I can’t think of a single job I’d rather have—in this world or out of it.” There were moments of levity at the preflight press conference for the crew of Gemini 4, Jim McDivitt and Ed White. Amid a flurry of questions, one reporter asked McDivitt: “Have you selected a name for the spacecraft?” and he responded with a wide smile, “I don’t know—what’s playing on Broadway these days?” In fact, if the crew had been given permission to do so, they would have demonstrated their shared patriotism by naming the Gemini 4 spacecraft American Eagle. There was even some back-room chatter that the lesser-known, alternate name for Gemini 4 had once been Little Eva. But when Gus Grissom impudently chose to call his vehicle Molly Brown it had caused such a furor within nasa management circles that the naming concession was immediately revoked. Humorous wordplays aside, the flight was once planned to feature a “little” eva, or limited exposure of an astronaut to space. Ed White, one of two space rookies on the crew, had begun training to open his hatch in space, stand up on his seat, and poke his head and shoulders out of the spacecraft. When the Soviet Union executed the first eva, these plans changed dramatically. The crew commander, James Alton McDivitt, was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 10 June 1929. His family later lived for five years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, during which time he attended Central High School. Rosemary Sheldon shared a year in biology class with McDivitt at high school. She remembers him as “easygoing, quiet, very pleasant and always smiling about something, . . . neither outstanding for his doings one way or another. To me, he was just plain Jim, a very ordinary fellow, dissecting his frog just like the rest of us.” After high school McDivitt had no definite ideas about a future career, and for a time he took on temporary work as a water boiler repairman. Then in 1948 his family moved once again, to nearby Jackson, where McDivitt entered Jackson Junior College. He graduated in June of 1950, the same month that the Korean War erupted. He was twenty years old, and rather than be drafted he decided he wanted to serve his country as a fighter pilot. “I’d never been in an airplane,” he told interviewer Doug

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Ward in 1999. “Never been off the ground. I’d already joined the Air Force, was in the Air Force, and was accepted for pilot training before I had my first ride. So, fortunately I liked it!” McDivitt entered the air force as an aviation cadet in January 1951, gaining his pilots' wings and a commission as a second lieutenant the following May at Williams afb in Arizona. He completed combat crew training at Luke afb six months later and was shipped over to Korea, where he took to the skies in Lockheed f-80s and swept-wing North American f-86 Sabres. Flying for the 35th Bombardment Squadron, McDivitt carried out the required one hundred combat missions and stayed on for forty-five more, because “there was a shortage of experienced pilots,” he later said, and because “I thought I could do a good job.” In fact, he did such an outstanding job that he was decorated with the Air Force’s Distinguished Service Medal with oak leaf cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters, and the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters. “I flew my last [combat mission] two hours after the armistice was signed—with a lot of trepidation,” he told Ward. “Nobody wants to get shot down after the war is over!” Following his return to the United States, where he decided to stay in the air force, McDivitt met his first wife, Patricia Ann Haas, and they were married in June 1956. The following year he was promoted to the rank of captain, and the air force recommended his enrollment at the University of Michigan under the Air Force Institute of Technology program, for further studies in aeronautical engineering. In 1959 he was awarded a bachelor of science degree after ranking at the top of his class of 607 students with a straight-A record. At university he had also become great friends with one of his classmates—a fellow pilot named Ed White. Edward Higgins White II was born into a family of career military officers in San Antonio, Texas, on 14 November 1930. At the time, his father, who had earlier been one of the U.S. Army’s pioneering balloonists and aviators, was stationed at nearby Kelly afb. Although he was only eight months old when his family moved on, to an air force base in Hawaii— one in a long string of such assignments for his father—White always considered San Antonio his hometown, and was proud of his Texas heritage. Following in his father’s footsteps, he received an appointment to the military academy at West Point and was subsequently commissioned in the air force after his graduation in 1952.

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On completing flight school he married Patricia Finegan, a girl he had met while at West Point, giving both he and McDivitt something else in common—wives named Pat. He then served as a tactical fighter pilot in Germany until 1957, when he was also selected by the air force to attend the University of Michigan and study for his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. Like McDivitt, White achieved the rank of captain while at university, graduating in 1959. While at Michigan McDivitt and White were not only good friends; they also lived just down the street from each other, and would often discuss what each man might do in his future career. At one time, McDivitt had thought about earning a master’s degree through the air force, but his application was turned down. He was also offered an assignment as a Project Office engineer at Wright-Patterson afb, but it was a nonflying job. He said that was “about the last thing I wanted to do.” Ed White, on the other hand, knew exactly where he was heading. “He was going on to the Test Pilot School,” McDivitt recalled. “He’d applied for it and been accepted. I thought, ‘Heck, I’ll do that!’ . . . and so I put in my application. I heard back in about two weeks that I’d been accepted, which was a whole different route for my career.” McDivitt and White then attended the usaf Experimental Flight Test School (efts) at Edwards afb as part of Class 59-c, graduating in 1960. Not only did McDivitt receive the prestigious A. B. Honts Award as the outstanding graduate of his class, but he was also honored with other awards for best all-round flying performance and best academic student—making him the first efts student to win all three awards. He then elected to stay on at Edwards as a test pilot in Flight Test Operations. “And it was a great job,” he said. “Probably the best job I’ve ever had.” Ed White, meanwhile, was sent to Wright-Patterson afb in Ohio, where he flew as an experimental test pilot with the Aeronautical Systems Division. “I wanted to fly airplanes and continue to do what I was doing,” McDivitt said of that exciting time. It was therefore with a measure of reluctance that he attended the usaf Aerospace Research Pilot School, which was preparing pilots for space programs such as Dyna-Soar. One of his instructors at the school was Frank Borman, also destined to become a nasa astronaut and who, ironically, would serve as his backup pilot for Gemini 4. After graduating from the aerospace school in December 1961, things

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happened in a rush. Late in 1962, x-15 pilot Robert (Bob) White said he would be leaving the program for a posting in Germany. McDivitt was asked if he would like to step in as a replacement and fly the mighty research airplane. “Of course, I jumped at that!” he recalled. He was also offered the role of project pilot on the f-4 program, “a cushy, wonderful job,” and then one of his bosses asked if he would like to be assigned to the Dyna-Soar program. After flying to the Boeing plant and discussing the project with those developing the winged spacecraft, McDivitt concluded that “the Dyna-Soar Program would never fly. It was a lot more screwed up than anything else I’d ever seen. The spacecraft was wrong. They were trying to make it a military weapon system. It wasn’t. It was too heavy. There wasn’t a rocket that could lift it. So I went back and told my boss I really wasn't interested in the Dyna-Soar Program.” With that, he was assigned to both the x-15 and f-4 programs. Soon after, his commanding officer happened to mention that nasa was looking for a second group of astronauts, but with all that was going on McDivitt was not interested. “I want to fly the x-15,” he recalls saying that day. “I want to stay here and fly airplanes.” Some time later he began to have a change of heart, and discussed his future with the retiring x-15 pilot, Bob White. White told McDivitt what he'd already suspected, that he should use his expertise in the way that would serve his country best, and if that meant being an astronaut rather than an x-15 pilot, then so be it. “That sounds kind of dorky today,” McDivitt said of his youthful patriotism, “but that’s the way I felt.” There was only one small problem—astronaut applications had closed a few weeks earlier. However, despite being only a lieutenant colonel, Bob White was a man of considerable influence. He soon persuaded some people within the air force hierarchy to submit a late application nominating McDivitt. Early the next day, a livid commanding officer stormed into McDivitt's office, “threw my application on the floor, and called me a traitor.” He demanded that the application to join nasa be immediately withdrawn. When McDivitt refused, he yanked him from the x-15 program, and venomously added, “Your career is over!” It was a very difficult time for the young air force officer, but then to McDivitt’s relief the cards fell neatly into place once again. “Fortunately,” he reflected, “I got selected!” Not only had he become a member of the second astronaut group, but his best friend, Ed White, had also been successful. As McDivitt told Ward, he

The newly selected crew of Gemini 4: space "rookies" Ed White (left) and Jim McDivitt. Courtesy nasa.

had received a welcome surprise while attending an initial nasa selection interview in Washington dc. “I walked in the room in the Pentagon and Ed was already there . . . and he says, ‘I knew you’d be here!’ And I said, ‘I knew you’d be here, too!’ ” One of their former Edwards instructors, Tom Stafford, was also selected in the group of nine new astronauts, and he would later say of the two friends, “I knew they were outstanding choices.” McDivitt’s selection as an astronaut in the civilian space agency actually led to a small but unexpected problem for a person who’d basically worn nothing but a variety of military uniforms for many years. “All of a sudden,” he said, “ninetyfive percent of your wardrobe is extinct!” The only civilian clothing he possessed was “one or two obnoxious-looking sport coats and maybe two pairs of slacks.” He and Pat had to hurriedly add a little clothes shopping to their list of things to be done.

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As an astronaut, McDivitt quickly displayed his exceptional leadership potential. Conservative but incisive, deeply religious with a fine and thorough military orderliness, he began to impress the right people. “Jim didn’t talk much,” according to Gene Cernan. “He let his work speak for him.” One reporter described McDivitt as “a deceptively easy-going sort who combined the rare ability of getting speedily ahead with the even rarer trait of winning friends on the way.” When the two friends stood on a Houston stage in September 1962 to be introduced as members of nasa’s second intake of astronauts, it was White who said in his brief speech that “Jim and I have been following right along together.” He then added with a smile, “It seems that every time we got together, we were taking examinations of some kind.” Once their group had settled in at nasa, the two friends were given engineering assignments under the mentorship and guidance of the Mercury astronauts. McDivitt's work related to guidance and navigation, while White concentrated on flight controls. During this period, and before moving to the new Manned Spacecraft Center (msc), they also shared an office in downtown Houston. “We had a very close career all through that time,” McDivitt recalled, then added, “He was the best friend I ever had.” Ed White was a superbly fit athlete. In fact, he had narrowly missed being selected for the 1952 U.S. Olympic track team, failing to qualify in the 400-meter hurdles by just four-tenths of a second. As West Point’s Assembly magazine once noted of the former cadet, “He had inherited the qualities of leadership, devotion and perseverance from his parents . . . added his own inborn attributes and then forcefully began to make his way through life. His devotion to Duty, his Country and to his classmates provided Ed, from the very beginning, with a natural trend towards greatness.” Indeed, the 1952 West Point yearbook, Howitzer, had said of White that he was “craving excitement and adventure and seldom passing up the chance to do something out of the ordinary.” He soon proved the editors right. At nasa, White continued to impress with his physical fitness, keeping in shape by running long distances, supplemented by weightlifting, squash, handball, and water-skiing. Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts’ physician, stated that “He could run the mile, fight a ten-round boxing match, swim twenty miles and do anything that would require physical

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endurance.” White also became extremely popular with the media, who appreciated his exuberant, talkative attitude. McDivitt and White were publicly named to the flight of Gemini 4 on 27 July 1964, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell as their backups. Compatibility was important on Gemini, especially on the planned long-duration missions, and Deke Slayton took this into account when selecting his crews. He already knew McDivitt would prove an outstanding spacecraft pilot, while the two men were buddies from way back. At first, the mission objectives were hardly those to attract much media attention. Under the command of McDivitt, the crew would conduct a four-day flight around the Earth sometime in 1965, during which they would photograph the Earth’s weather and terrain, measure radiation, and study electrical discharges. Or, as McDivitt characterized it, “Medical experiments, tests and other assorted junk.” Then, things changed. A nasa document circulated on 12 March 1965 suggested that one of the Gemini 4 crew members might open the hatch of their spacecraft, and stand with his head and upper torso exposed to raw space. Deputy Manager of Project Gemini Kenneth Kleinknecht hinted to reporters that nasa was studying the exciting possibility. Initial plans had McDivitt penciled in for this task, and for a time both men involved themselves in early eva training. Then McDivitt concluded that being commander was a full-time job in itself, and after lengthy consultations with the decision-makers Ed White was officially given the job. Whenever a reporter asked about those early plans for a limited eva, nasa officials would stress that they hadn’t made any firm decision. It was something of a smokescreen, perhaps to appear noncommittal in light of the Soviet Union’s track record for beating nasa’s announced goals. But while nasa procrastinated, the two astronauts were in serious but clandestine eva training. Events were also moving fast on the other side of the world, and within the Cosmonaut Training Center Soviet spacefarers were deep in training for yet another space spectacular. Meanwhile, McDivitt and White watched and worked with McDonnell’s engineers as their spacecraft was being built at the plant in St. Louis. They also practiced for hundreds of hours in the simulator replica at Houston, until they were largely in harmony with its environment and

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systems. One of the first real problems McDivitt and White encountered was a distinct lack of headroom in their spacecraft. Designed around Gus Grissom’s smaller frame, the taller astronauts quickly discovered that the tops of their helmets would be jammed against the hatch for the duration of their flight. Accordingly, McDonnell’s engineers decreased the amount of padding on the inside of the hatches, but for the almost six-foot-tall McDivitt and White it still proved a tight squeeze. A launch target date of 3 June was announced for Gemini 4. Then, in the middle of March, Alexei Leonov squirmed out of his air lock to conduct history’s first spacewalk, and once again a frustrated nasa had been beaten to the punch. Something had to be done—and quickly—to prove that American space technology was equivalent to, if not better than, that of the Soviet Union. An American eva would provide the obvious response. According to Frank Borman, “The general feeling was that we weren’t quite ready for eva at this stage of the program, but the Soviet walk in space changed that thinking in a hurry.” Soon after, acting under new mission guidelines, the two astronauts went into training for a full eva outside of their spacecraft. Other objectives evolved. Now there were plans for McDivitt to perform some formation flying with the second stage of their Titan booster after reaching orbit and for White to somehow make his way over to it on his spacewalk. It was a highly ambitious and audacious plan. Their training intensified, and the two men secretly practiced eva techniques until late in the evening with the special equipment they would use on the flight. A propulsion device was badly needed if White was to move around outside the spacecraft, and one was quickly devised. It was a small, gas-propelled unit, which was tested with the aid of an air-bearing table at msc; but it was extremely difficult to replicate the way in which White would move around in weightlessness. For the flight, McDivitt would be wearing the new, standard Gemini suit, weighing twenty-six pounds, but White’s had extra measures built in. His suit, five pounds heavier than McDivitt’s, featured eighteen layers of material—felt, Dacron, and aluminized Mylar plastic—to protect him against possible micrometeorite impacts and the extreme temperatures he would face outside the spacecraft. He would also have a small chestmounted strap unit containing an emergency oxygen supply. As well as

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an inner visor to maintain the suit’s internal pressure, White’s helmet also featured a gold-coated middle visor of Lexan plastic, which would protect his eyes by allowing just 10 percent of the sunlight to reach his face, and finally a blue-green outer visor made of Merlon, thirty times tougher than Plexiglas. Additionally, both spacesuits featured something new to U.S.manned spaceflight: small American flags sewn onto the left shoulders. On 24 May an important milestone for the flight was achieved when qualification tests for all of the eva equipment were successfully completed. By then White had spent sixty hours rehearsing his eva in an altitude chamber set at 180,000 feet, even though the spacewalk would take place at nearly three times that altitude. Included in this training were 110 rehearsals that involved climbing out of the hatch and then returning to the cabin. On 3 June 1965 the two astronauts were awakened at 4:10 a.m., fifty minutes before the final countdown began. They had a brief physical examination and then ate a hearty breakfast of sirloin steak and eggs. With the flight of Gemini 4, Jim McDivitt would also become the first Roman Catholic to fly into space, so before he and White left the crew quarters he took part in a small communion ceremony with two priests who had joined the crew for breakfast. Unlike the earlier Mercury flights, the two astronauts were dressed in casual clothing as they were driven out to Launch Pad 16 in the transfer van. Here they would spend the next hour and a half having sensors attached to their bodies and donning their spacesuits. When ready, they would ride up the elevator and enter their spacecraft a little under two hours prior to the scheduled launch time. Thirty-four minutes before launch there was a hitch in the countdown when a faulty electric motor had to be replaced in the erector. This was the cranelike gantry that cradled the ninety-foot Titan II rocket, and was normally lowered during the last phases of the launch. Before the problem was fixed, McDivitt was a little concerned that the erector might go haywire and hit their Titan rocket, which would probably have resulted in the crew being forced to eject. But when the repairs seemed to be going well he settled back, and both men even fell asleep. A while later they were awakened and asked if they'd like to speak to their wives while work continued on the faulty erector, which proved a welcome diversion before

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their launch. Once the motor had been installed and tested the countdown was resumed, and at t-30 minutes all the technicians were ordered to clear the pad area. At 10:16 a.m., an hour and sixteen minutes late, the Titan’s engines roared into life, and the rocket trembled as it waited to be unleashed. Then the hold-down clamps were released, and Gemini 4 was on its way. Soon after, McDivitt reported, “Roll complete.” “Roger,” was the response. Just five minutes and thirty-nine seconds after launch, Gemini 4 was in orbit. It now became the first manned mission to be controlled by the new Mission Control Center in Houston. “It looks great up here,” McDivitt reported. After separating from the second stage of the booster rocket, which had burned all its fuel, he fired two of the spacecraft’s aft thrusters to add thirty feet per second to Gemini 4’s velocity and pull them away from the tumbling second stage. McDivitt turned their spacecraft around so the blunt end was facing forward and reported that Gemini 4 was established in orbit. He also said that the booster’s 27-foot second stage was approximately 500 feet away, but in a slightly lower orbit. Soon after, as they flew into the darkness of the night side of the planet, the crew began to prepare for the first major task of their mission. McDivitt would attempt to fly formation with the drifting upper stage and maneuver in as close as he could safely manage. Plans then called for White to commence his eva and float over to the booster with the aid of the propulsion gun. Once there, he would remove a piece of material that had been placed on the outside to study the effects of launch heating. If they could accomplish this, the bold plan would certainly result in some truly breathtaking photographs. McDivitt would later state that a number of unexpected difficulties then arose. In the hurried mission planning, no one had taken into account the fact that the booster’s tanks would normally go into a vent condition once it had achieved orbit. This meant that the tanks were still expelling residual propellants, resulting in the same effect as a small rocket engine. In the vacuum of space, this caused the weightless booster to tumble, slowly but continually rotating around its center of mass. Maneuvering close to it was now a high-risk proposition.

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McDivitt not only had this to contend with, but as Gemini 4 swept around in the darkness of Earth’s shadow another problem also became apparent. To facilitate the rendezvous, the Martin Company had installed a strobe light on either side of the Titan II booster. The bright flashing lights on the booster were dazzling, and McDivitt also quickly discovered it was almost impossible to align Gemini 4 in such a way that he could see both lights simultaneously. Most of the time, due to the slow rotation of the booster, only one of the lights could be seen, meaning he could get no depth perception at all on the target. As they emerged into sunlight once again, things only got worse. Being in a slightly lower orbit, the booster stage was traveling faster relative to the Earth than the manned spacecraft, and McDivitt experienced great difficulty catching up. Because no simulator had been available for ground training in this difficult maneuver, much of what he attempted was purely instinctive. He also did not have the luxury of an onboard radar or computer, and had to make all his calculations by peering out through a small triangular window, with nothing more than his own eyes and judgment to guide him. “I knew what would happen in theory,” he said later. “But we had no practical training.” Eventually, after half an hour and despite his best efforts, the gap between them had widened to half a mile. As they flew over Mexico, McDivitt reported that “it is taking more fuel than we estimated. Shall we make a major effort to close with it, or save the fuel?” Gus Grissom was on CapCom duty at the time, and he looked over at Flight Director Chris Kraft. “Give it up,” Kraft sighed. “Tell him to save the fuel.” In fact, McDivitt had already expended nearly 50 percent of his fuel supply in the futile chase, and the remainder would be needed for the spacewalk and reentry. Grissom passed the message to McDivitt, who concurred. As Grissom would later point out, “the effort did point out that the orbital mechanics involved in rendezvous were a little more involved than had been expected.” Their disappointment did not last long. Just seconds later Grissom relayed a welcome message from Chris Kraft to the crew: “Okay, we’re giving you a GO for your eva at this time.” Though the eva was originally planned for the second orbit, it took McDivitt and White so long to go through the forty-item checklist that Mission Control wisely decided to

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delay until the third orbit. McDivitt also wanted White to relax and cool down a little, as he had noticed that his copilot looked tired and hot. “It sounds like you've been awfully busy,” Gus Grissom commented to the crew as Gemini 4 slipped over Florida at the end of its second orbit. “Yeah, I finally got a chance to look out the window,” McDivitt replied. “It’s really nice.” The revised eva schedule meant that the egress would take place over Bermuda in full daylight. Chris Kraft harbored concerns about trying to get White back inside the spacecraft before they flew into darkness on the night side, so he wanted the spacewalk kept short, as planned. In particular, Kraft did not want the crew “fooling around in the dark.” As he continued to monitor the flight, the two astronauts checked their pressure suits, sealed their helmets, and began purging the air from Gemini 4’s cabin as they neared Carnarvon in Western Australia. Robbed of the chance to do an eva that involved the booster, White now began to prepare for a far less hazardous spacewalk, in which he would simply exit the spacecraft and float around for a few minutes, maneuvering with the aid of short bursts of compressed nitrogen from the tiny space gun. This seven-pound device, slightly resembling handlebars on a bicycle, was known officially as the Hand Held Maneuvering Unit, or hhmu, but it had quickly become known to everyone as the “Zot” gun. Its chief drawback was that it carried only a miniscule amount of fuel, but McDivitt later remarked that it would not have made much difference anyway. “It was a hopeless device. There was no way you could really control yourself in six degrees of freedom with just that. The gun was useless.” When they were both ready, White reached overhead and tried to unlock his hatch, but there was a mechanical malfunction. A spring inside the hatch had failed to compress. The two began prodding and poking around the hatch ratchet, and to their relief the hatch suddenly cracked open. Even though it proved surprisingly difficult for White to push outward, even in zero-g, the hatch was soon fully open. As White peered out through the open hatch, both men would have felt a lingering concern. If the hatch had proved tricky to open it might be just as difficult to close, and if they reported the problem to Mission Control, the eva they trained so long and hard for might be canceled. Either way, the hatch would still have to be closed sometime, so they figured they

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might as well go ahead with the eva and not tell the ground. “I mean, there was nothing they could do,” McDivitt later said of their predicament. He then coyly admitted, “and they probably would have said no.” One hundred and thirty-five miles above the Earth, White carefully stood up on his couch, mounted a camera to the exterior of the spacecraft, and snapped off a few photos. McDivitt reported that everything looked good, so Kraft gave White permission to proceed with his eva. Shortly afterward, White pulled himself outside into raw space, followed by a glove spinning loose from the cabin. He was attached to Gemini 4 by a 25-foot-long, one-inch-thick lifeline wrapped in plastic tape coated with gold. Known as White’s “umbilical cord,” it carried an oxygen supply and communications wires. He then used his propulsion gun to move to the front of the spacecraft so McDivitt could take some photographs. White quickly attached a 16-millimeter movie camera to a brace at the rear of the spacecraft to record some of his actions, and used a still camera attached to his hhmu to photograph the view below. At the postflight press conference, White would recall his impressions as the first American astronaut to walk in space: “There was absolutely no sense of falling. There was very little sensation of speed, other than the same type of sensation that we had in the capsule, and I would say it would be very similar to flying over the Earth from about 20,000 feet. I think as I stepped out, I thought probably the biggest thing was a feeling of accomplishment as one of the goals of the Gemini 4 mission. I think that was probably in my mind.” All too soon, the Zot gun ran out of fuel, and White had to maneuver himself by manipulating and tugging on his tether. He made his way to the nose of the spacecraft once again, where he thought he might be able to hold onto something, while McDivitt performed a small attitude correction using the oams thrusters. In fact, whenever White impacted with the spacecraft it moved, just as the Soviets had found on their eva mission. However, McDivitt was having very little difficulty controlling the Gemini craft and keeping it stable. The only thing White could see to hang onto as he moved up the spacecraft’s exterior was a communication antenna, but he decided against it. After the flight, he said, “I took one look at the stub antenna, which was our connection with radio back to Earth, and I felt that this wasn’t any place to play around with, and so I didn't do any work around the nose of the spacecraft.”

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During his spacewalk three months earlier, Alexei Leonov was said to have reported feelings of disorientation, so doctors on the ground were anxiously waiting for White to comment on his condition. This came as Gemini 4 was approaching the coast of California. “There is absolutely no disorientation associated with this thing,” White happily reported, as he pushed himself off the spacecraft and practiced rotating around, using the tether. He then hauled himself back to Gemini 4 and by tugging on the lifeline even managed to walk on the corrugated spacecraft. “There's no difficulty in recontacting the spacecraft,” he added. “I’m very thankful in having the experience to be first. Right now I’m actually walking across the top of the spacecraft. I’m on top of the window.” Meanwhile, McDivitt had been snapping away with his camera, busily recording the historic event. “Hey,” he jokingly protested, as White brushed against his window. “You just smeared up my windscreen, you dirty dog!” The banter continued as Gemini 4 flew over Texas, with White describing some of the spectacular sights below, but also reporting on the effectiveness of his spacesuit, helmet, and other equipment. But while they were conversing between themselves they were effectively unable to receive voice communications from the ground. In order to talk to Houston and receive messages, McDivitt first had to flip a switch. Flight Director Chris Kraft would later say that this was a monumental error, “a flaw in our thinking that I made certain never happened again.” At last, McDivitt told White he should see if Houston had anything for them, and flipped the communication switch. Immediately, Gus Grissom said: “The flight director wants for White to get back in.” Unfortunately, they still did not hear this transmission, as the astronauts were using an overriding voice-activated internal communication system that made it difficult to hear ground-based transmissions. So as White continued his twists and tumbles, Grissom kept repeating, “Gemini 4, Gemini 4 . . . ” Eventually, McDivitt heard the transmission and responded. “Hey Gus, this is Jim. Got any messages for us?” For the first time on the flight, and to Grissom’s surprise, the flight director, concerned with White’s protracted stroll, unexpectedly assumed control of communications with the spacecraft by engaging an override switch. In doing so he had violated one of his own strict rules on ground-to-spacecraft communications, but he wanted

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White in, and said so. “Yes!” he barked in response to McDivitt’s inquiry. “Tell him to get back in!” The message was immediately relayed to White, whose breezy comment was “This is fun.” By now, he had been floating freely in space for nearly twenty minutes, and had conducted his spacewalk from Hawaii clear across to Florida. McDivitt now began coaxing his colleague in with increasing urgency as the darkness of Earth’s night side loomed. “Come on, Ed,” he finally called, his voice just a little sharper. “Let’s get back in here before it gets dark.” “It’s the saddest moment of my life,” White replied with obvious reluctance, as he made his way back into the spacecraft. Then it was time to try closing the hatch, and both men prayed that they could accomplish this. Despite the difficulty they had encountered in getting it unlatched, McDivitt felt confident they could secure the hatch once White was back inside. Since there was no way they could reenter Earth’s atmosphere with the hatch not fully closed and latched, McDivitt was also pressing White to get back in while there was still some daylight to work by. Unfortunately, it was already dark again by the time White and all of his equipment were safely inside the cabin. They closed the hatch, and then their worst fears were realized. It wouldn't lock. If they could not find some way to rectify this, Gemini 4 and its occupants could well be incinerated during reentry. Fortunately, McDivitt had taken careful note of something a spacecraft technician had demonstrated to him after an eva simulation in the altitude chamber in St. Louis. On that occasion, they had also been unable to lock the hatch down again, so after they had showered and changed McDivitt wandered back to see what the problem was. As he watched with interest, the technician placed his finger into a slot in the locking mechanism, located a small cog that hadn’t engaged properly, and nudged it back into place. After that, the hatch locked down without any further problem. It was not quite as easy for McDivitt, as he was working in the dark. He also had to be very careful not to puncture the tips of his gloves as he slipped his finger into the slot and fiddled around trying to locate the small cog. Finally, he felt what he was after, and pressed it into place. The hatch locked down securely, and both men breathed a deep sigh of relief. As Frank Borman later observed in his book Countdown, “Making it even tougher were the awkward, rather primitive spacesuits White and McDi-

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vitt were wearing—performing any manual task with those bulky gloves was like trying to open a can with handcuffs on your wrists.” Because of their problems with the hatch the crew decided to cancel a scheduled second hatch opening, which would have allowed them to jettison some bulky equipment that had only been needed for the spacewalk and would clutter up the cabin. Despite the overcrowded conditions, they would keep all their gear in the cabin until they landed. Once they had secured and repressurized the spacecraft, the two astronauts were finally able to relax. Both were overheated and physically exhausted after their efforts, particularly White, who took a couple of hours to fully recover in his much heavier spacesuit. Beads of sweat covered their faces, and the inside of their helmets had fogged up. However, once McDivitt had powered down the spacecraft things finally settled down, and both men eventually fell asleep. White’s spacewalk, for all its problems, had happily resolved the fearful issue of whether an astronaut would become disoriented on eva. The crew had proved that astronauts could move freely outside of their spacecraft, which allowed future missions to include many external functions and work in space—a vital step on the way to the moon. There was, however, a hint of the problems that would soon affect other American spacewalks. At their postflight press conference, McDivitt stated that he had noticed White was breathing quite heavily with exertion after the relatively simple task of mounting the external movie camera. White responded that he hadn’t realized he was tiring himself so much, “but I did notice that I was putting out energy for the first time during the eva exercise.” The superfit White had made his walk in space look so apparently easy and effortless that it induced some unfortunate complacency among planners, who set even harder and more complex tasks for subsequent eva missions. Relaxed and refreshed after several hours of drifting flight, the astronauts spent their second day in space coping with “garbage all over the place.” They had a small well under their feet for stowing used equipment, but with White’s spacewalk gear still aboard they had precious little room in the cabin. In fact, White said they were so short of space that he was carrying the bulky umbilical cord nestled in his lap. Later that day the crew

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talked with their excited families at the msc in Houston, and were congratulated on the spacewalk by their wives. White responded, “Quite a time we had. Quite a time.” Physicians had expressed a little concern about the crew's lack of water intake, so Pat McDivitt and Pat White told them in wifely, no-nonsense terms to drink more water and get enough rest. One of the flight’s chief objectives had been to test the effects of prolonged weightlessness and confinement under conditions of possible stress on the mind and body. So much remained just theory. Some doctors had even speculated that being in zero-g for a hundred hours might prove too much for the human body, and the astronauts might even die when they landed. In reality, however, McDivitt and White felt good, and the drifting tumbling of their spacecraft did not cause them any concerns or illness. They knew that even their failure to make a rendezvous with the booster rocket would eventually provide useful lessons and information for the future. On their final day in space, McDivitt and White took star and horizon readings, took photographs for meteorologists of a bank of eddy clouds over the Canary and Madeira Islands, and performed further physical exercises for the flight surgeons by using a strong bungee cord they could attach to their feet. Then, as the crew began receiving its landing instructions, McDivitt told controllers that they were trying to stow as much gear as they could for the reentry. Ripples of laughter erupted at msc when he commented that the cabin was “so full of things I can barely see out the window.” Despite their cramped conditions the crew was in good spirits. When they were asked, “You two ready to come home yet?” McDivitt joked of his traveling companion, “I’m sure tired of looking at this ugly face. It needs a shave.” To a light-hearted suggestion from mcs that “we are thinking of extending the mission about a week,” White—a man with a famously huge appetite—chimed in, “Well, if you do, you’d better send up some more food.” In preparation for landing, McDivitt began firing control rockets over Hawaii as Gemini 4 approached the end of its sixty-second orbit, and jettisoned the adapter module. An ibm computer had been installed in Gemini 4 to help McDivitt’s landing maneuvers, but when he had earlier tried to shut it down to save battery power it had refused to comply. Eventually, it was decided to disconnect and reboot the computer, but when it was

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switched on again it no longer functioned. The crew would now have to rely on the system used by the Mercury astronauts, which essentially allowed gravity to do the work once they had begun reentry. The maneuvering rockets had eased Gemini 4 down to a new orbit with an apogee of around ninety-eight miles. Then, on the command “Start burn,” as they passed over Guaymas, Mexico, McDivitt fired the four retrorockets. “Affirmative,” he reported. “Am firing.” Gemini 4 then began its swift descent back to Earth. McDivitt brought the spacecraft down to a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Bermuda. Despite the failure of its landing system computer they were only fifty-six miles from the waiting carrier uss Wasp, and two minutes ahead of schedule. As they waited for the recovery force to move in, McDivitt couldn’t help but recall the grim preflight predictions of some alarmist doctors, who feared that the astronauts’ bodies might not be able to cope with protracted spaceflight and might even succumb to the stresses of reentry. Despite their worries, he felt good. He looked over at White and asked, “How do you feel, Ed?” White grinned and said, “Just fine.” With a chuckle in his voice, McDivitt then commented, “I guess we aren’t going to die after all!” White’s weak stomach eventually let him down, and he became seasick in the bobbing spacecraft before a helicopter managed to pluck the two men from the sea. They were rapidly transported across to the waiting carrier, where a red-carpet reception was waiting for them. Though the bearded astronauts were pale and exhausted after their space marathon, they happily waved, gave the thumbs-up to photographers, and saluted with gusto. White even surprised everyone, particularly the doctors, by performing a little jig on the flight deck. Following this, the two men then endured five and a half hours of medical tests. During the tests they were able to speak with their wives by telephone and also took a call from an ecstatic President Johnson, who told them: “You have written your names in the history books and in our hearts. What you have done will never be forgotten.” He then invited them down to his Texas ranch the following weekend and added enticingly, “I have been saving a little something for you.” Once their tests were completed, the weary duo visited the captain’s cabin, where they showered and shaved. Afterward they enjoyed

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a light meal with the recovery task group commander, Adm. William McCormack, before crawling into their beds and falling sound asleep. Both then slept for nine and a half hours. Meanwhile, initial medical reports said both crew members were in fine physical condition after more than four days of weightlessness. The next day, White saw a few Marines and midshipmen enjoying a hearty round of tug of war. To everyone’s amazement, he grabbed the rope and joined in. In Houston, George Mueller summed up the flight by saying: “We are all tremendously pleased with the results of the Gemini 4 flight. It was one of the most successful missions in our manned spaceflight program.” The astronauts’ physician, Dr. Charles Berry, predicted that medical data from the record-breaking flight would “knock down an awful lot of straw men” concerning the human ability to live and work effectively in space for long periods. “For one thing, McDivitt and White exhibited no symptoms of lightheadedness when they came back to Earth,” he said. “They are in better shape after four days than Gordon Cooper was after thirty-four hours in space two years ago. Possibly because they had exercise equipment aboard. One straw man that was knocked was the theory that we might have a couple of unconscious astronauts on our hands.” McDivitt and White never did make it down to LBJ’s Texas ranch, but a few days after their homecoming they attended an official ceremony at the Manned Spacecraft Center, attended by President Johnson. The president’s promised “little something” turned out to be presidential nominations for immediate promotions from major to lieutenant colonel, which he said was “for their spectacular achievements.” He then handed over brand-new silver maple leaves to two very surprised astronauts. For good measure, and since the furor over the previous mission’s corned-beef sandwich incident had died down, the president finally promoted Gus Grissom to lieutenant colonel, and added that Gordon Cooper would be elevated to the same rank on 15 July. In his congratulatory speech to the crew of Gemini 4, Johnson remarked: “What impresses me and gratifies me most about these two heroes—and all the other astronauts—is the quality of personal modesty and humility.” He then added, “I haven’t yet met a man who has not come down from space wanting to give more credit to the men and women on the ground than he will accept for himself up there.”

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For their part, McDivitt and White presented Lyndon Johnson with—as McDivitt called it—“a picture of Ed.” It was one of the magnificent shots the commander had taken of White during his history-making spacewalk, which had just been released to the public. Following Gemini 4, Ed White joined Michael Collins on the Gemini 7 backup crew, which should have automatically placed them as the prime crew for Gemini 10. Instead, White told Collins that he had discussed his future options with Deke Slayton, the Mercury astronaut who was now Director of Flight Crew Operations. White had agreed to forgo Gemini 10 and move straight into Apollo training. Slayton was also keen for McDivitt to move into Apollo; it was known that he wanted McDivitt to eventually command a lunar landing mission. In fact, McDivitt would go on to command Apollo 9 and later become one of the youngest air force officers ever selected for promotion to general. Amiable without going overboard, he was always highly regarded by his peers in the astronaut office. In his The All-American Boys Walt Cunningham offers this characterization: “No one was more deliberate or meticulous than Jim McDivitt; no detail was too small if it affected his mission. He eliminated problems by working them to death. When he presented his case he had the facts. . . . Most of Jim’s contemporaries considered him the ‘anointed one’ of the nine Gemini astros. Looking back it does appear he was given every chance, break, prerogative, and option, beginning with command of the second Gemini mission.” It was now increasingly evident that the two successful Gemini missions had helped nasa bridge the gap with the Soviet Union in the race to the moon, and there was the tantalizing promise of more outstanding missions and accomplishments to come. As pad leader Guenter Wendt would later write, “We were ready to get on with the real business of spaceflight: long-term missions, and orbital rendezvous and docking. Everything else had been done just to get to this point. Now, the real work began.” Gordon Cooper’s masterful flight aboard Faith 7 had brought the Mercury program to a successful conclusion. Once the postflight celebrations had

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died down he was keen to pick up a Gemini mission assignment, but his boss, Deke Slayton, was a little more cautious. Slayton would later say that, despite Cooper’s outstanding performance on the final Mercury flight, he was still regarded as “a question mark” by management. For a while, therefore, he was unsure whether to assign him to another flight. The Mercury astronaut's talent and skills eventually prevailed over his “hot shot” reputation with the nasa hierarchy. Cooper apparently remained unaware there had ever been a problem. Referring to the pre-Mercury flight tension between him and the head of flight operations, Walt Williams, Cooper told the authors that the two of them “became very good friends after my first flight, when he came to me and said, ‘I just wanted to tell you I was wrong.’ So I had no idea. I never got that feedback from them.” Slayton finally penciled Cooper in for the long-duration Gemini 5 mission in the middle of 1963, although the assignment was not officially announced until 8 January 1965. The acclaimed Mercury astronaut was teamed with the fun-loving but highly regarded space “rookie” Pete Conrad. They had formed a close working friendship during their jungle survival training early in Pete’s astronaut career. This mission would not only beat the endurance record then held by the Russians, but would hopefully also provide evidence that people could live and work in space for several days. In fact, the Gemini 5 flight would last for the length of time it would take an Apollo crew to reach the moon and return. Conrad was naturally elated to have picked up an early flight, especially as he was paired with the experienced Cooper. “I feel a lot better about sitting up in the right-hand seat on my first ride with somebody that's been there before,” he said of his mission commander. In his book, Leap of Faith, Cooper described Conrad as a “go-getter-type guy . . . the shortest of the astronauts, at five feet six inches, and also one of the funniest and most irrepressible with his lively sense of humor and gap-toothed grin.” Outspoken, funny, and feisty, Conrad never worried about what others might think of him, instead giving his opinions in a free-spirited way that kept his colleagues in stitches. Indeed, some astronauts who worked with him later commented that it was hard to be close to him because it seemed everyone knew him and liked him. A cool, snazzy dresser, Conrad personified to many the hotshot astronaut of the era. Conrad was not all wisecracks, however. It was also very evident to his

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colleagues that he was one of the best, brightest aviators and engineers they had ever met. His combination of wit and sharp ideas transmitted enthusiasm to everyone around him. His colleagues would work hard to achieve his ideas and ideals, as they did not want to disappoint him. As Guenter Wendt wrote: “Pete Conrad was what everyone thought an astronaut should be.” At first, the projected third two-person mission was to have included the first eva, to be carried out by Pete Conrad. When Alexei Leonov floated free of Voskhod 2 in March 1965, however, things changed, and nasa planners moved eva plans forward to Gemini 4. The mission focus of Gemini 5 now switched from eva to one of extended duration. When asked at a news conference to comment on Leonov’s shock spacewalk the previous week, Conrad was both philosophical and gracious. “I have nothing but admiration,” he observed. “Certainly, I would have liked the opportunity of being first, but I don’t think it really matters to me. I have no sour grapes about the Russian space program. I feel they have a program which is just as aggressive as ours.” Cooper had been looking forward to their eva flight. However, the turnaround in mission objectives, while a considerable nuisance, would actually prove to be quite providential. “I suppose a long-duration flight was fine,” he recounted for the authors. “It gave me the opportunity to do a lot of things. Actually, although we wanted to do the eva, it kind of relieved us of some problems. We were running out of room with all the experiments we were carrying, all the things for a long-duration flight. It was going to be pretty nip-and-tuck, being able to carry all of the eva equipment as well.” Despite the mission change, Cooper later said that he and Conrad were told they still had to wear bulky, uncomfortable eva suits for the entire eight-day mission. “We felt that Gemini would have been proven well enough by Gemini 5 that we could wear regular flight suits,” he mused. “We made a major project of trying to convince nasa of this, and almost made it. But there were just one or two ‘weak sisters’—people who didn't have the courage to make the decision and let us go with them. Since we weren’t opening the hatch, and had a very reliable pressurization system for that period of time, we felt like we could wear just a regular airplane flying suit and helmet.”

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Charles Conrad Jr., selected in the second group of astronauts, went by the nickname “Pete.” Though he was named after his father, a World War I balloon pilot, Conrad’s mother wanted him called Peter. She may have lost the argument then, but he quickly became known as “Pete” anyway, and the name stuck, though later he was also known as “Tweety Bird” to many of his fellow pilots. Married to the former Jane DuBose, he had four young sons when he joined nasa. Conrad, born 2 June 1930, had wanted to be a test pilot from the age of six. Growing up in a middle-class family, he developed an early passion for flying through his father. At the age of nine he was building simulated cockpits “out of dining room chairs and soapboxes” in his bedroom, which provided endless hours of enjoyment. “I’d be sitting in the Spirit of St. Louis for hours, right alongside Lindbergh,” he recalled. By the time he had turned fifteen, Conrad was working as an apprentice mechanic in an airfield machine shop near his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He was also learning to fly, and went solo for the first time at the age of sixteen. He gained his pilot’s license soon after, and then went to Princeton University, a prestigious “Ivy League” center of higher learning, on a U.S. Navy scholarship. While there he completed the regular rotc program, and when he graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1953, Conrad also received his commission. He immediately applied for flight training and became a naval aviator, later serving at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. In 1957 he entered the Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River. Some time in his early teens, during the war, Conrad acquired a tattoo—a blue anchor surrounded by stars with his initials underneath. Unless any of the early air force cosmonauts had one, it is likely that Pete Conrad became the first person to fly into space with a decorative tattoo. Having completed his training, Conrad served as a project test pilot with the armaments test division at Patuxent River Naval Air Station (nas), working with such high-powered airplanes as the f-8 Crusader. His next assignment came in 1960, as a pilot instructor and performance engineer at the Patuxent River Test Pilot School. Conrad had been interviewed in 1959 for a place in the first group of astronauts but did not make the cut. Although he possessed all the necessary skills and qualifications, his carefree, even flippant attitude during the medical and psychological examina-

Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and Charles (Pete) Conrad preparing for their long-duration Gemini 5 mission. Courtesy nasa.

tions (he even told the proctologist he’d been unnecessarily rough) did not sit well with the selection panels, and he was rejected. According to Frank Borman, “Pete Conrad’s advice on handling interviews was, ‘If you can’t be good, be colorful,’ but not many of us could be both good and colorful as Pete was—he had a wonderful sense of humor that he erected as a façade over his exceptional ability.” Wally Schirra agreed, telling the authors that he’d also met his convivial match: “Conrad, they felt, wasn’t able to live alone in space, or endure in space. The shrinks pretty well screwed up on that one. He was considered one smart ass-tronaut. I held the title until Conrad came along. There was no way I could compete with him.” Three years later Conrad was asked to volunteer again, and this time he was accepted. “I didn’t regard it as something new,” he said of applying to join nasa. “It was very straightforward—simply a logical step for a test pilot. We had reached as far as we

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could go in the atmosphere. Space was the obvious follow-on. The problems are not all that much different for a test pilot.” Provisionally, the flight of Gemini 5 was targeted for the first day or two of August. Cooper and Conrad had been in training since February, giving them six months to prepare for the longest space mission yet attempted. The June flight of Gemini 4 resulted in a colossal amount of data that had to be examined, absorbed, and resolved, and this only served to complicate matters for both the crew and the flight control team. Cooper found himself struggling to keep up. According to Tom Stafford in We Have Capture, “Training for the flight didn’t go smoothly. Gordo also had a fairly casual attitude toward training, operating on the assumption that he could show up, kick the tires, and go, the way he did with aircraft and fast cars.” As precious weeks ticked by, Deke Slayton began to realize the crew would never be ready in time. “I got on the plane and went to see George Mueller [associate administrator for the Office of Manned Space Flight at nasa headquarters] to ask for help and he delayed the launch by two weeks.” As well as carrying twice the fuel capacity of Gemini 4 for maneuvering and altitude control, Gemini 5 also had the primary objective of testing a newly developed, sophisticated device called a fuel cell. These cells were designed to replace heavy, conventional batteries, and the long-duration flight presented an ideal opportunity to test them. Weighing less than a fifth of batteries that produced the same amount of energy, the cells would generate electrical power without any moving parts by bringing together oxygen and hydrogen at very low temperatures. The gases would react to form water—a valuable by-product on extended flights—and energy would be released in the form of electricity. The flight would also be the first to be equipped with radar, specifically one developed to aid future crews in orbital rendezvous and docking techniques. During their flight the crew would release a free-flying optical and electronic device with a flashing light and transmitting-receiving beacon known as the Rendezvous Evaluation Pod (rep). Weighing around sixty-six pounds, the suitcase-shaped pod (quickly renamed “The Little Rascal” by the astronauts) would be released from its stowage point in the

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spacecraft’s adapter module, and then tracked as far as fifty miles away using the onboard radar. The astronauts would then try to close to within fifty feet of the pod. There was also much interest in one particular experiment to be carried out by the crew from orbit. During his mission in May 1963, Cooper had reported seeing from space many man-made objects on the ground, including objects as small as one truck in a desert. Scientists wanted to further evaluate such observations in a controlled test, so as the astronauts prepared for their mission, designated areas in the deserts of Texas and Western Australia were also being readied with huge rectangular patterns. The Texas grouping, made from panels of plastic and gypsum, ranged in size from 25 by 100 feet to 100 by 400 feet. Sixteen similar checkerboard patterns were also being laid against the red-brown soil 130 miles southeast of the Carnarvon tracking station in Western Australia. These, however, were made from eighteen hundred tons of white seashells transported by bulldozers from a beach thirty-seven miles away and then evenly spread an inch thick to form the vast geometric shapes. It was hoped that the white-brown patterns would be used in visual tests by the crew to assess the effects of prolonged weightlessness on vision. Interestingly, the first mission patch worn on an American spacesuit was designed by the crew of Gemini 5. It was essentially a very tongue-in-cheek effort, showing a stylized Conestoga wagon with the motto “8 Days or Bust” embroidered on its side. The motto was a reference to the legendary “California or bust” that was the rallying cry of early western pioneers. According to Cooper, the two men had earlier thought about naming their spacecraft Ladybird, in honor of the wife of then-president Lyndon B. Johnson. nasa, however, vetoed the idea after the Gemini 3 crew had irreverently named their spacecraft Molly Brown. The two astronauts then decided to design a mission patch as a unique souvenir of their long-duration flight. It was Cooper who hit upon the idea of “8 Days or Bust,” a resolute term that aptly described their primary mission objective, which was to stay in space for the same amount of time it would take to get to the moon and back. He discussed the concept of a mission patch with nasa Administrator James Webb, but Cooper said that the administrator “wanted

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to designate the missions with terms like Mission No. 2 and Astronaut No. 7—no personalities, nothing personalized.” Webb could hardly have found two more renowned rebels than Cooper and Conrad, and despite his rebuttal of the idea they went ahead anyway. “As it turns out, two nights before launch he invited us back to Houston to have dinner with him and we confessed to him what we had done,” Cooper told Space Flight News in 1987. They informed Webb that the patches were already sewn onto their spacesuits, and they planned on wearing them. “So he had me send him a copy of the patch, along with a little quick memo-wire telling him the details about it and how the covered wagon idea of the patch had arisen. When it was finally approved, he said, ‘Okay . . . on one condition. You don’t have a provision for the fact that you might not make the full duration.’ ” Although the two astronauts were supremely confident they would fly the whole eight days, Webb asked that they simply tape a small patch over the “8 Days or Bust” wording—until they had actually returned from the mission. This was satisfactory to Cooper, and he said, “Right—we’ll do it!” The slogans were eventually covered by small squares of silk loosely sewn over the slogan, which could easily be ripped off after the flight. Thereafter, James Webb gave permission for a mission patch to be designed by the crew commander or senior pilot for each successive mission, to be worn on the right breast beneath the astronaut’s nameplate. This was subject, of course, to the patch design being approved by both the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center and the associate administrator for Manned Spaceflight at nasa headquarters. It is a tradition that continues to this day. On 19 August 1965, Cooper and Conrad sat atop their Titan II booster, waiting to be launched. This first attempt would end in frustration, firstly due to a problem caused by a stopcock getting jammed while the fuel cells were topped up, and then by a sudden thunderstorm that swept across the Cape. A power surge resulting from a lightning strike caused the primary telemetry system between Mission Control, the Cape, and the spacecraft to fail. “The whole complex went flat-dead for an instantaneous period of time, until the backup generators came on,” Conrad later told Space Flight News magazine. “All power dropped off the spacecraft—and the rest of the pad for that matter—when the lightning hit whatever it was, a transformer

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somewhere in the vicinity of the Cape. I can remember very well turning to Gordo—I think we were at about T-minus ten minutes in the count— saying ‘Well, I think that’s it for the day!’ because every gauge in the thing went to zero and came back on again. There was no way, in my mind, nasa would ever launch us having a glitch like that go through the system.” Two days later, Gemini 5 stood ready once again for launch, with the two astronauts listening in anticipation as the countdown neared zero. Careful checks had determined there had been no damage to the ship’s onboard guidance system, and all communications had been successfully restored. Conrad was particularly interested in all the sights, sounds, and sensations of his first launch. “The thing about the Titan that I remember was somewhere in the count, like at T-minus thirty seconds, they open the oxidizer pre-valves. The oxidizer was all the way up in the tank, and that line runs all the way down through the fuel tank down to the base. So when they opened that thing up, you are sitting on top of this thing—you are not that far away—and you can hear it going ‘glah, glah, glah.’ ” There would be no delay this time: the launch took place almost right on schedule—in fact just one second before 9:00 a.m. Cape time. It was a ride that Cooper told the authors felt a lot different from his MercuryAtlas launch: The Titan was a lot heavier . . . solidly made vehicle. I certainly had a smoother ride in some way. The Atlas, of course, you had to keep it pressurized to keep its shape, when it was on the ground. So you can imagine, the Atlas was like pushing against a balloon going up; it had a lot more give to it, a lot more oscillation. Although it was certainly a good ride, it was a different . . . solid feel. The Titan, however, had a fuel pogo. These big fuel lines, they’d build up these passage semi-blocks, pressurization cycles within the lines, giving you a pogo effect. This pogo effect occurred in the low frequency range, and caused you to lose vision. The instruments would start oscillating at the point where they’d vibrate, and you’d get where you could hardly see them. Pete Conrad and I had previously been the ones to run the testing on the pogo, on a big shake table, to determine the levels we had were acceptable at worst, but very marginal. We fixed the problem, but when they recycled our launch, they had to re-purge the pneumatics, refill the air on one side. They did not do it properly. It was ironic that we were the ones to have fixed it, yet we got it! They fixed it properly for the next flight.

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Cooper has described the Titan II rocket as “a Cadillac” in comparison to the Atlas booster, but Conrad told Space Flight News that it was more like a sports car, “because you lifted off at 1.18 G, first stage burn-out was 6½ Gs, and second burn-out was 7¼ Gs. You made orbit in about six minutes and forty seconds . . . so you knew you were going somewhere in a hurry. I mean, that hummer got up and got with it!” Gemini 5 entered an initial orbit of 216 by 100 miles, and Cooper later used the maneuvering rockets to tweak their perigee up to 106 miles. Cooper, becoming the first person to fly twice into orbit, was obviously delighted to be back in space again. He reported: “It feels mighty good. It’s been a long time getting back . . . everything is going fine.” But trouble loomed just ahead for the crew. On the second orbit, after a successful radar lock-on with the free-flying rep, Cooper suddenly reported a steady pressure drop in the liquid oxygen tank that supplied oxygen to the powergenerating fuel cell. At some point earlier in the flight the oxygen supply’s heater element had failed, which seemed to be causing the new problem. It was a critical situation, and the rendezvous evaluation practice was swiftly abandoned. By the sixth orbit it seemed that the spacecraft would have to make an emergency return, and contingency plans were put in place for a Pacific splashdown. Navy airplanes were hurriedly ordered to take off from Hawaii to watch for the spacecraft as it descended by parachute. From a high of 850 psi, the pressure dropped to an alarming 60 psi, but this fortunately stabilized after Cooper carried out an emergency powerdown of the spacecraft’s electrical systems. Meanwhile, Houston told the crew that a new flight program was being evaluated. After ground engineers and designers analyzed the problem and came up with solutions, they gave the crew instructions for a cautious powering-up procedure on the seventh orbit. Fortunately, the pressure began to build again, and power levels soon became sufficient for the mission to continue. The crew was informed they could “Keep going,” while Flight Director Chris Kraft reported that “At the moment, I don’t see anything to stop us going eight days.” Cheered by the decision to let them complete the flight, the two astronauts reported that “Everything is go up here!” Because the planned rendezvous practice with the rep had been canceled, the crew carried out an attempted rendezvous with an imaginary target: a nonexistent Agena rocket spinning in space near the spacecraft.

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They closed to within a short distance of the phantom rocket after a twohour chase, and the test was regarded as a vicarious success. In one small milestone near the halfway point in their flight, Cooper and Conrad observed and photographed the fiery launch of a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which had been launched to coincide with their pass over the U.S. Pacific coast. Conrad reported seeing the 58-foot rocket’s vapor trail a few seconds after it emerged from the firing silo. “I see it, I see it!” he exclaimed with evident excitement. “There it goes. . . . He’s over the water. . . . See it, Gordo? It’s bigger'n heck . . . we can still see it quite clearly.” A similar experiment was carried out the following day, and once again the crew was able to observe the launch. When talking about their observations, Conrad would later say: “As I remember it, Vandenberg was covered with ground fog. You could see them coming up out of the overcast, and of course being solids [solid-fuel rockets] they were leaving a super smoke trail.” The experiment in sighting huge geometric ground patterns from space was not altogether successful, however. Conrad would later say: “We never did—as I remember—get a good look at the visual acuity targets that they had in Australia and Texas. We had trouble finding both of them, but we did find the one in Texas on one or two passes.” Other unusual sightings that the crew did make were a rocket-sled test taking place at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, in which a vast cloud of water sprayed from a trough served to brake the sled, and their prime recovery vessel, the uss Lake Champlain, steaming across the Pacific. At one point Cooper complained that they had too many experiments to do all at once. “Bang, bang, bang, right together,” Cooper complained irritably. “We’ve got every piece of gear in the spacecraft floating around trying to keep up.” Conrad initially remained far more upbeat. When told by Mission Control that he was talking too much, he promptly began singing instead. As Cooper recalled, the Gemini spacecraft was a very small area for two people to live and work in for more than a week, particularly with the amount of equipment that was stored around them: “We designed it to give us more effective room. In reality . . . it had less room per person than Mercury had, but there was a little more usable room. You could scootch around a little better.” Unpacking several items just to get one out, while keeping track of it all, was a nightmare under weightless conditions.

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It was very small, but there was a lot of housekeeping to do. When you used equipment, you had to put it right back in its container, otherwise there wouldn’t be room to do anything. You could leave a piece of equipment floating in front of you, and it would stay there, unless you used the thrusters, then the pieces of equipment would drift to one side. You had to keep watching. It was easy to misplace things—you’d have to hunt for them. You felt weightlessness most when you would bend around to get something out from behind you. You had storage lockers just aft of you, so you could get things out of the way, store them away. You could completely turn around in there. Toward the end of their flight, the crew of Gemini 5 began creating new space endurance records. They eclipsed the Soviet Union’s total time in space of 507 hours and 16 minutes and beat the single flight record of cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky when they sped beyond the 119 hours and 6 minutes he had flown in June 1963. Conrad’s Gemini commander may have become the first person to fly into orbit twice, but Conrad took great delight in the fact that he had become, for a while at least, the person to have spent the second-longest amount of time in space. As Gemini 5 flew on, new problems cropped up, putting the crew’s “8 Days or Bust” motto at risk. The water by-product from the oxygen-hydrogen mixture feeding the fuel cells was rising in the tank, threatening to drown the cells and cut off their power. Then, two of the spacecraft’s sixteen maneuvering rockets gave out. To conserve power and maneuvering fuel, Cooper put the spacecraft into a slow-tumbling, drifting mode. It was going to be a tight finish, but Mission Control continued to give the crew a cautious okay to keep going. Although they were now in a drifting flight, Pete Conrad loved the way the craft reacted when it was controlled. “Gemini was like flying a high-performance fighter,” he observed after the flight. “You did everything manually. You flew it.” However, as he later told Air & Space magazine, eight days was a long time to spend in space with very little to do: I call it eight days in a garbage can. The fact is, you can’t do anything. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t move and have no great desire to sleep because you’re not doing anything to make you tired. You don’t have anything to read and there isn’t any music.

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Near the end of the mission, most of our thrusters had crapped out, so all we could do was drift and, as the fickle finger of fate would have it, when we were over the ocean, that’s when the spacecraft would be pointing down and all we’d see was the water. By the time it got to land, which is much more interesting to look at, that’s when we would start pitching up and we’d be looking at black space. I spent half my life opening stuff up and re-wrapping it real tight so we didn’t have garbage all over the cockpit. If it wasn’t for that I would have probably shot myself because there was nothing else to do. After almost eight days in Earth orbit, Mission Control was piping music up to the crew, trying to keep them entertained. It was truly time to return, and it was almost a relief that the end of the flight had to be trimmed by one orbit due to a forecast of bad weather moving in on the Atlantic recovery range. Cooper later said that Conrad had some concerns about the reentry. “He was worried about the attitude control thrusters. The attitude control thrusters we were using during the flight were gradually going out, one by one. They were failing. So he was concerned—we all were concerned—that the re-entry thrusters would not work properly.” Just as Cooper had encountered on his previous flight, Gemini 5 presented him with reentry complications that required his piloting skills. Incorrect data had been fed into the computer, which meant that they were reentering at too steep an angle. Deceleration forces shot up to seven and a half g’s. “The computer didn’t set us up very well for an accurate landing,” he later told the authors. We had to ignore the computer guidance—because the wrong data was loaded in, and it was guiding us in too steeply—and go to full lift to recover part of the distance. We had to roll about one hundred and eighty degrees; Gemini was certainly an incredible machine, and with the offset center of balance, you certainly could do a lot of longitudinal and lateral maneuvering, although we were still off a little bit on our landing area. I was on top of the situation; the g’s were very acceptable. You learn with every flight, and with each flight you make progress, and you learn the right way to go on and take that into the next flight. After the critical reentry blackout period, the jubilant voices of the two

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astronauts could be heard reporting in, saying “We feel okay.” Then, as the 84-foot orange-and-white parachute billowed out to lower them toward the water, Conrad radioed: “Roger, main chute out!” Gemini 5 came down to an off-course but perfectly safe landing in the choppy Atlantic southwest of Bermuda, about eighty miles from their waiting carrier, uss Lake Champlain. An hu-97 search airplane was circling over the bobbing spacecraft within minutes. When a helicopter from the Champlain reached Gemini 5, three navy frogmen jumped into the water, attaching and inflating a large flotation collar around the spacecraft. Both astronauts, now sporting scruffy whiskers and huge grins, climbed into a waiting life raft before being hauled up into the helicopter for transportation to the carrier. Their spacecraft was retrieved by the destroyer uss Dupont. The two astronauts were later declared to be in good health after their history-making flight of seven days, twenty-two hours, and fifty-six minutes. With the successful conclusion of their mission, Cooper and Conrad could finally remove the small silk squares covering their flight patch, and there it was for all the world to see—“8 Days or Bust.” But it had certainly been a close thing. Although Conrad’s astronaut career was now in its ascendancy, Cooper's was in serious decline. In fact, Gemini 5 would be both his second and last spaceflight. Following the record-breaking mission, Deke Slayton assigned Cooper the job of backup commander for the 1966 Gemini 12 mission. It was a clear dead-end assignment, as this would be the last Gemini flight, and training for it would keep Cooper from flying any of the earliest Apollo missions. Despite having commanded two very successful spaceflights, Slayton later said that Cooper was “basically marking time” by this point. His relationship with nasa managers had not improved, leading Flight Director Gene Kranz to describe Cooper as “the loner and rebel against the spaceflight bureaucracy.” “That’s fairly accurate,” was Cooper’s response when reminded of Kranz’s words. “The manned space program started with one hundred and fifty people involved in it. Ten years later we had sixty thousand . . . doing the same thing. Admittedly, the program had become a lot bigger, but not sixty thousand people. Everybody had built their little empires. Typical bureaucracy set in, in a big way. The way we caught the Russians was by not really having a bureaucracy to start with. Then, you could get all of the

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key people in . . . make a total change in fifteen minutes, because it was all first-name acquaintance. You scribbled out a little piece of paper, handed it around, and the change was made. By the time you have sixty thousand people in, that same change would take you a month!” When his work on Gemini 12 was over in late 1966, Cooper received yet another assignment—this time as backup commander for the Apollo 10 flight. Under the crew rotation system then in place, Cooper, Donn Eisele, and Ed Mitchell could reasonably expect to be subsequently assigned as the prime crew for Apollo 13. But when Cooper found out that Eisele had been placed on his crew, he began to suspect that something was seriously wrong. Eisele was going through a divorce, and it was common knowledge at nasa that he was unlikely to fly again. Following the Apollo 1 fire, nasa Administrator James Webb made a very telling remark during the 1967 Senate hearings on the tragedy. Commenting on Wally Schirra’s assignment to command Apollo 7, he said that, “He will become the only astronaut to fly three generations of U.S. spacecraft—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.” Although it was probably just an off-the-cuff observation recognizing Schirra’s many contributions to the space program, to some it sounded like Cooper's fate may have already been sealed. Despite his rebellious reputation, which he knew did not sit well with nasa’s management, a restless Cooper was still drawn to the heady competitiveness of sports car racing, and entered a race at Daytona while training for Apollo 10. As soon as Slayton was informed of this, he told Cooper in no uncertain terms to withdraw from the event. “He wasn’t very keen on me racing at Daytona, and pulled me out of it,” Cooper reflected. “The rules hadn’t been spelled out loud and clear before then. But after that, it got spelled out loud and clear. I was very annoyed. We’d done a lot to get the car all qualified. I was having a lot of fun auto and boat racing. I got the bad end of it—but nothing ventured, nothing gained!” After being pulled from the Daytona race, Cooper did not endear himself to his nasa bosses either when he flippantly said to a news reporter, “I guess they want astronauts to be tiddlywinks players!” The widely published quote could hardly have helped his prospects for another flight. A legitimate concern for nasa, apart from Cooper’s slight insubordinate streak, was that he

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might be named to a crew and then injured late in the game in a racing accident, forcing a last-minute replacement on a critical flight. Spring 1969 saw the successful lunar flight of Apollo 10, but it also saw another event that was to change the Apollo assignments. Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut to fly, had been restored to full flight status following a lengthy medical grounding and was eager to command the first available flight. He had been chief of the astronaut office during his exile from flight status, and had the power and close connections with Slayton to be able to jump right back to the head of the line. The next flight to which a crew had not yet been assigned was Apollo 13, and Slayton decided to name Shepard as mission commander. As Cooper told it, Shepard and Slayton held a meeting with him, in which he was told he would also be training for Apollo 13—but as backup commander. He was devastated: I felt that the higher-ups would really analyze everything carefully, with enough capability that whichever guy was selected might be the best guy for that particular flight. I wanted to get assigned to a prime crew. There were people in Washington who could have made that decision, but nobody would. I hated to see the typical government bureaucracy come crawling into spaceflight. Here was an opportunity to do the best job you could, with the best people involved, with the required funding to do it with. Actually, it ought to have operated ideally. Instead, a lot of politics got involved. I had been planning on commanding a flight to the moon. But Al and Deke were trying hard to get back into space. Al looked after Al, and could be cutthroat when it came to what he wanted. He wasn’t to be trusted when it came to his best interests. I was the youngest of the original seven, and the only one on active flight status at that time. I had been completely trusting, thinking they’d choose people on their strengths. But they wanted missions for themselves, and all bets were off. I guess maybe I was a little naive. It was kind of unexpected that they did that, and very disillusioning. I was very disappointed that I did not get to fly Apollo. It was a terrible blow. It took me years to forgive them for that unfairness. In the end, however, we made up; we forgave each other and became good friends again. Cooper said he turned down the backup assignment and then, believing he would never get another prime crew assignment, left nasa and the

The quiet nobility of Gordon Cooper, photographed in September 2004. Courtesy Francis French.

air force in early 1970. The Apollo 13 and 14 crews were switched to give Shepard’s crew more training time. By the time both missions had concluded and Shepard had walked on the moon, Cooper was already gone. Following his resignation he maintained an active schedule, working on numerous aerospace and electronic projects with a number of companies. His strong belief in the existence of other civilizations beyond our planet, and the possibility that they might be visiting us, influenced much of his post-nasa career. The post-nasa years also brought about reconciliation with his former Mercury astronaut colleagues. Massive public interest stirred up by the book and film The Right Stuff had them all talking to each

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other again. As Slayton said at the time: “Old disagreements didn’t seem so important anymore.” They set up a charitable foundation together. Apollo astronaut Walt Cunningham once said that Gordon Cooper was “an adventurer, who was willing to pay the price, and did.” When asked about this by the authors, Cooper’s face showed mixed emotions as he pondered the statement for a moment. “I suppose I wouldn’t disagree with it,” he finally responded. On Monday, 4 October 2004, the forty-seventh anniversary of the launch of the first Soviet Sputnik, a stubby experimental vehicle with the unpretentious name of SpaceShipOne shot into history, climbing to an altitude of 69.6 miles over California’s Mojave Desert with solo pilot Brian Binnie at the controls. When the spacecraft reached an altitude exceeding 62 miles for the second time in a week (the first flight in the same craft had been under the command of Mike Melvill) Binnie earned his astronaut wings. A non government consortium called Scaled Composites, founded in 1982 by famed aero designer Burt Rutan, claimed the $10 million Ansari X Prize as the first team to achieve this historic feat. Peter Diamandis, who headed the X Prize Foundation, spoke enthusiastically of the historic event later that day. “What we have here, after forty years of waiting, is the beginning of the personal spaceflight revolution,” he stated. To many, this audacious event was almost like a ceremonial passing of the torch to a new generation of spacefarers. Just as Gordon Cooper had become the last nasa astronaut to journey into orbit alone, so Burt Rutan’s pilots could be seen as precursors to what will eventually become a whole new generation of space pilots and commercial spacefarers. But even as the space community celebrated the historic feat, some sad news was also sweeping around the world. Gordon Cooper, the famed solo space pilot, had passed away from a heart attack that morning at his home in Ventura, California, aged seventy-seven. Among the tributes were these from the three surviving Mercury astronauts. “Gordo was one of the most straightforward people I have ever known,” reflected John Glenn. “What you saw was what you got. Pride in doing a great job, whatever his assignment, was his hallmark. You could always depend on Gordo.” Scott Carpenter said: “This is truly the passing of a beloved member of a unique fraternity. He had no equal anywhere. We celebrate his con-

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tribution, but at the same time we remind ourselves that nothing in the construct of man stands forever. I’m really going to miss that guy.” Wally Schirra remembered Cooper in a droll but respectful way that his Mercury colleague would doubtless have appreciated: “not too bad of a water skier, not too bad of a pilot, but a heck of a good astronaut.”

2. A Rendezvous in Space Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a test pilot, Wally Schirra knows that almost every space mission from the mid-1960s until the present day has relied on one thing: the ability of two spacecraft to find each other in orbit. Without such a capability, there could have been no moon landings, no space stations—in short, no space program. Schirra, who piloted the key spacecraft in the first-ever orbital rendezvous, knows how vital that task, the centerpiece of the Gemini 6 mission, was to any future plans, and he was thrilled to be assigned to it. The mathematics needed for such meetings in orbit are complex, but were in fact the easier part of the attempted feat. Perfecting the engineering and piloting capabilities would prove much harder. Though the Soviet Union had orbited two spacecraft at the same time, they still lacked the ability to rendezvous in space. With the successful completion of Gemini 5, the next three American missions would not only be demanding test flights, during which nasa gained that vital experience, but they would also demonstrate orbital rendezvous techniques that the Soviets were unable to emulate at that time. It would not be easy: rockets malfunctioned and exploded, and one Gemini crew would come perilously close to losing their lives. These setbacks could have delayed the program. Instead, individuals and the choices they made once again made the difference. Decision-makers on the ground devised bold mission changes that kept the program on track, while the astronauts made equally risky, life-saving decisions. Without this ability to adapt, nasa might have faced many frustrating years of delay.

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Early in the Gemini program Wally Schirra was given command of the Gemini 6 mission. It was a mission the veteran Mercury astronaut wanted because he regarded it as the piloting high point of the Gemini program. Gemini 6 ’s original mission was to rendezvous with a separately launched, unmanned Agena—the upper stage of an unmanned Atlas rocket—and then dock with the specially designed conical docking collar mounted on it. After conducting attitude control tests while docked, Gemini 6 was to undock and return home. It would be a short, busy flight, and an interesting challenge for a couple of experienced test pilots. Joining Schirra on the crew was Tom Stafford, a rookie from the second group of astronauts, and one of the more outstanding pilots in an already elite group. Mike Collins later wrote that Schirra and Stafford made a good team, with “Stafford’s penchant for things electrical and mathematical acting as a strong right arm for the cool commander.” The crew worked hard at becoming rendezvous experts, training in a variety of complex mathematical approaches to a target. As Schirra told the authors, not only did the crew have to learn the most practical rendezvous method, but they also felt obliged to ignore the advice of the one astronaut who had a doctoral thesis in orbital rendezvous: Buzz Aldrin tried to get credit for our success, but he almost screwed us up. Buzz had this academic mind, and realized that there were two ways of doing a rendezvous. One way—his way—was mathematically pure, but if you messed up a little bit, you’d really mess it up. I told him we were not going to do it that way. He was talking about perfection, and perfection is when you’re docked—not doing the maneuver. So we looked at a different way: the right way of doing it. We spent a lot of time in simulators. Dean Grimm, a NASA engineer, was one of the guys I worked with. I am indebted to those kinds of people. Of course, Young and Grissom were our backups and they worked on it too—about five or six of us really spent a lot of time on it. Stafford and I were going to do it right; it was a crucial step. Yet for all the hard work, Schirra still had time to invent rendezvous-related quips, some of which he later shared with the authors: “Did I tell you exactly what a rendezvous is? When a man looks across a street and sees a pretty girl, and waves at her, that’s not a rendezvous, that’s a passing acquaintance. When he walks across the street through the traffic and nibbles on her ear, that’s a rendezvous!”

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Thomas Patten Stafford was born on 17 September 1930 in Weatherford, a place he describes as “the dust bowl of western Oklahoma.” The son of a dentist and a teacher, he was born severely underweight, and would later write in his memoirs that he was “fortunate to survive infancy.” When he was fourteen he took his first airplane ride, and it made him eager to learn to fly himself. He was also an accomplished scholar, largely because his mother encouraged him to read. He grew fast, shooting up to six feet while in high school, and as a result did very well in sports, particularly football. In fact, he was good enough at the sport to be considered for a university football scholarship. However, he was also enamored with entering the Naval Academy and becoming a naval aviator. By studying very hard, he eventually earned an appointment to Annapolis. Mike Collins says that Stafford was so accomplished in engineering at the academy that he “sopped up wiring diagrams with the same ease that some teenage girls memorize the words of popular songs.” In 1952, he graduated from the academy with a bachelor of science degree, before entering the air force. He had decided to switch services because, at the time, the air force had the fastest jets. The following year, Stafford had not only married Faye Shoemaker, a girl he had met in high school, but he also received his wings. He then served as a fighter pilot both in the United States and overseas, flying the hottest jets with delight and expertise. In 1958 he applied and was selected for the usaf Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards afb, winning a trophy as the outstanding student of his 1959 graduation class. Staying on at the school as an instructor, he wrote comprehensive manuals on performance flight testing, taught students such as future astronaut Frank Borman, and became chief of the performance branch of the Aerospace Research Pilot School. He had not been considered for the first group of astronauts because he was not only one inch too tall, but had also not yet finished test pilot school. Following a relaxation of the height limit he was a natural to be selected as one of nasa’s second group of astronauts in 1962. The day he was chosen was in fact his third day at Harvard Business School’s master’s in business administration program. He’d chosen to attend because he believed that the air force “had good technical ability, but their big problem was management,” as he told interviewer William Van-

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tine. He also thought the experience would prove useful when he finally retired from the air force. By joining nasa instead, he earned what he calls “the notoriety of being the first dropout of the class.” Stafford’s business sense served him well as an astronaut. He quickly impressed the right people and became the first person in his group to score a flight assignment, although circumstances beyond his control caused him to be bumped from a prime crew role to backup pilot. “I was to be on the first Gemini crew with Al Shepard,” he told the authors, “but Al got grounded due to medical problems.” Stafford wound up being reassigned to the Gemini 3 backup crew, under the command of Wally Schirra. Stafford’s quieter demeanor was a noticeable contrast to the more jovial, wisecracking Schirra, and his personality was hidden even more by a thick Oklahoma accent that some found hard to decipher. As cosmonaut Valeri Kubasov told the authors, “It is very difficult to understand Tom Stafford’s language, because it’s not the English language, it is Oklahoma language!” The sober, sometimes strict Stafford seemed more like a schoolteacher than a pilot to many of his colleagues. Yet his calm mannerisms masked a quietly efficient, determined, and extremely ambitious military officer. Of all those in the second group of astronauts, said by many to be the most talented group ever selected by nasa, Stafford was the one who would go the furthest in the astronaut pecking order. He would even move into a position where he made crew selections, an almost sacred duty previously reserved for the most powerful of the Mercury astronauts. Stafford would later command a mission with a Mercury astronaut as his backup, and have another even take a subordinate position to him on a prime crew. He seemed to ease into the right circles without any of the trepidation felt by some of his colleagues. “Some people were intimidated by Al Shepard, who could turn icy at the snap of a finger,” he would write in his autobiography, “but I got along well with him.” For Gemini 6, his first mission, he was off to an impressive start as a crew member on one of the program’s keystone missions. Stafford still fondly recalls that exciting time in the space program. “It was a great time to be there,” he explains, because every mission that we would fly would be something new, something that had never been done before. Each one depended on the previous mission.

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At the time, it was obvious that we were in a tremendous race. It was a race against time that President Kennedy had set, and also a race with the Soviet Union. They had already had two spacecraft flying at the same time, although not rendezvousing. Our response was very slow. We finally started flying the Gemini program, and we did not know it at the time but it was Gemini that put us well ahead of the Soviets. This was a classic example of how you take a sword and beat it into a ploughshare. We had fifty-four of those Titans on alert, and normally they would have carried a nine-megaton weapon on top. We substituted a nine-megaton weapon with an eight-thousand-pound Gemini. On 25 October 1965, Schirra and Stafford prepared to launch aboard Gemini 6. “There was a lot of pressure on Wally Schirra and myself for this rendezvous,” Stafford recalls. “It had been decided that the best way to approach a landing on the moon would be to do a rendezvous around the moon. We were sizing the giant Saturn V, and the Lunar Module and Command Module, all based on the premise that we would do a rendezvous around the moon. The problem was, nobody had ever done a rendezvous—so it was up to Schirra and me to prove the theory. If we could not learn to rendezvous and dock, we would be stalled on the moon trip.” Before their launch, their unmanned target—an Atlas Agena—was launched ahead of them. Although it had never been used before as part of a manned mission, the Agena was considered very reliable, having flown frequently and successfully since 1959. Schirra and Stafford were already strapped into their Gemini spacecraft when the Agena lifted off, just a few launch pads away from theirs. The Agena countdown had been flawless, and all looked good—for the first six minutes of flight. “We could hear our target vehicle roar off down on Pad 14, where the Mercury Atlas people were launched from,” Stafford describes. “Unfortunately, the Agena exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. Now we had no target vehicle, so we scrubbed our launch. What do we do now?” When the Agena had separated from its booster the vehicle began to wobble, and then exploded into five large pieces. Mission controllers tried to work out what had gone wrong with the usually reliable rocket. There was little telemetry that could give a clue as to what had gone awry, and they could only speculate on how long it would be until they were ready to try again. While some were dwelling on what had caused the explosion,

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others were already thinking about ways to rebound from this upset. An obvious thought was to replace Gemini 6 with the next Gemini spacecraft and fly that mission instead: there was no rendezvous planned for the Gemini 7 mission. However, it was soon realized that this was not an option; the second spacecraft was much heavier, in fact, too heavy for the booster now sitting on the pad. Literally minutes after the Agena explosion, senior officials were already discussing a bolder new plan. Instead of having Gemini 6 rendezvous with an unmanned target, why not have it rendezvous with Gemini 7? The main objective of Gemini 7 had already been set: send two astronauts into orbit and keep them there. The crew would try to remain in space for two weeks, undergoing a range of medical experiments to see how well humans adjusted to long-term weightlessness, and whether missions of the length needed to explore the moon could be endured. A number of nasa doctors worried what the results might be. As the Gemini flights steadily increased in length, the astronauts had returned with increasingly higher heart rates and lower blood pressure. If the rate of deterioration was the same as in previous flights, the Gemini 7 astronauts might find that their hearts were not able to effectively pump blood when they returned to Earth. Instead, it would pool in their legs, and they would black out. The doctors even put plans in place to remove the astronauts from the spacecraft and resuscitate them in a life raft if necessary. It is arguable whether the crew was thought of as chiefly pilots, or medical specimens. Gemini 7 was hardly the best mission of the program, and perhaps this is why it was avoided by the Mercury astronauts. Instead, they allowed two rookies from the second astronaut group to be assigned. Deke Slayton, when choosing a commander, believed that Frank Borman’s tenacious nature would be a good fit for a long mission, where a grim sense of duty would be the only way of enduring the long weeks in space. Borman summed it up as “not much of a pilot’s mission,” but it was an opportunity to impress. “I figured when they gave me Gemini 7, we’d do the best we could with it.” Joining him on the flight would be Jim Lovell. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were both born in March 1928 within eleven days of each other, and both joined nasa at the same time. Both were only children, born into poor families who struggled hard to make ends meet,

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and the duo even had the same hair and eye color. They have both enjoyed two of the most enduring marriages of any astronauts. Although one had served in the air force and one in the navy, their flying careers were very similar. However, their personalities were quite distinct. Frank Frederick Borman was a graduate of West Point, and to many who worked with him it seemed like he had never really left the place. Born in Gary, Indiana, on 14 March 1928 into a strict Lutheran family, he suffered in his youth from persistent breathing disorders. When he was five, his parents decided that the only way for his health to improve was to move to the desert conditions of Tucson, Arizona, where in fact he did greatly improve. He tried to read science fiction, but found that it bored him. Yet, like many other future spacefarers, he grew fascinated with aviation and saved up money for flying lessons by working part-time jobs. He was still a teenager when he earned his flying license. “I was rather small in stature,” he would write in his memoir, Countdown, “and like many undersized kids I tried to compensate by being feisty and maybe a bit too overaggressive; . . . the consensus amongst my peers was that I was too bossy and aggressive, a complaint that carried over to my adult years.” His father, who ran an auto repair shop, was not a wealthy man. There was no money to pay for his son’s flying lessons, and so the only chance to become an aviator was to join the military. In 1946 Borman was admitted to West Point as a cadet. “The boy was about to become a man, molded and forged,” he would write. “I was not only indoctrinated but inoculated.” He was lucky to get in—technically, he had waited too late to apply—but he had been helping the son of a local judge build model aircraft, and the judge helped him get on the list. Also on his side was the fact that he was a straight-A student: in his memoirs, Borman writes that he “was one of those lucky kids who never had to study hard.” He graduated from the prestigious military academy in 1950 with both a bachelor of science degree and a strong idea of how he should run his life: for duty, honor, and country. When he graduated he also got his wish to be commissioned into the U.S. Air Force. “I was into airplanes,” he told interviewer Catherine Harwood. “I’d never even thought about rockets or space. . . . I had no idea, no concept, nor any desire to participate in that part of the business.” The same year that Borman graduated, he also married Susan Bugbee,

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a girl he had met in high school when he was just fifteen. “When we got married in the 1950s, it was like a team,” Borman told Harwood. “She had her job and I had my job. And one of her jobs was to not in any way show any kind of fear or trepidation over what I was doing.” By 1957 he had also obtained a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and in the meantime had served in the air force as a fighter pilot. After obtaining his master’s degree he returned to West Point for three years to teach science as an assistant professor, and in 1960 attended test pilot school at Edwards, ranking first in his class. By this time, he was not just interested in flying within the atmosphere. He had grown curious about the possibilities the space age could offer and wanted to best position himself for selection as an astronaut. By the time nasa chose him in 1962, he was an instructor at the school in a new kind of aerospace program. “They were starting in what they called the graduate program, an advanced test pilot program, that would . . . hopefully, prepare people to fly in space,” he told Harwood. As he made the move to Houston, Borman had little idea what nasa would be like. In fact, he would treat the assignment very much as a continuation of his military career, not bothering much with the world beyond it. In 1969, for example, he had still never heard of movie icon James Dean, who had died a full fourteen years before. He later described his nasa years as “Eight years of total dedication. . . . I was with nasa with the objective of being part of the team that beat the Russians.” His personal ambition was probably the equal of Tom Stafford’s; Mike Collins described Borman as “attracted to money and power.” Yet although Stafford’s career progressed smoothly, Borman never quite reached the same heights. He would command the first-ever mission to the moon. But after only two flights he chose to leave active astronaut training to gain some administrative experience and apparently because he believed his astronaut status would transfer well into other areas of service for his country. At first, it did. He served as a special ambassador for President Nixon on the thorny issue of Vietnam, and was even offered a job on the White House staff. But he was not a Washington insider, and it was never made clear to Borman what his actual assignments would be. Instead, he carved out a career as an executive in the world of commercial aviation. It seemed that although the decision-makers always respected Borman’s

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personality and flying skills, he was perhaps too much of a straight arrow to ever be considered one of the insiders in the top fraternity where Shepard, Slayton, and, eventually, Stafford resided. “He wasn’t really one of the guys,” Gene Cernan would later write in his memoirs, “and somewhat holier-than-thou.” While some of his peers enjoying living up to their dashing public images, the ever-practical Borman once told a panel of senators that “I am afraid that sometimes the newspapers and the magazines attest a great deal more of the ‘silk scarf ’ attitude to the astronauts than actually exists.” In place of a silk-scarf attitude, Borman said that “If you ever want to get anything done you have to cut through the mass of things. You can generate an awful lot of enemies along the line. I’ve got a few.” He also had no time for the pranks that other astronauts played, and admits “I was something of a loner; . . . the most impatient and outspoken of them all. . . . I had started being that way when I was at West Point and I never changed.” Several years later, when interviewer Nancy Conrad asked him if he had a humorous anecdote about his astronaut days, Borman’s prim response was “Actually, I didn’t think much of it was funny. . . . To me it was hard work and there wasn’t any frivolity to it.” It was an honest attitude, but one that was not going to make him many close friends or move him into the astronaut inner circle. To his credit, Borman can joke somewhat about his hard-nosed personality today, admitting “I’m stuck with it!” Borman had been under strong consideration to join Gus Grissom on the original backup crew for the first manned Gemini mission, but there was something about him that Grissom did not like. “I went over to his house to talk to him about it, and we had a long talk,” Borman related to Harwood. “After that I was scrubbed from the flight. So I guess that I didn’t pass the test with Grissom. Don’t know why. Nobody ever said anything to me about it. I never asked. Could have cared less.” Instead of training with Grissom he found himself serving as backup commander for Gemini 4, paired with Jim Lovell. “I wasn’t the most popular astronaut,” Borman wrote in his memoirs, “but I didn’t give a damn.” James Arthur Lovell was born on 25 March 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in Wisconsin. His father, a coal furnace salesman, died when he was twelve, and his mother worked as a secretary to pay the bills. They

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shared a one-room apartment, and struggled as best they could to make ends meet. Just like Frank Borman, he met a girl in high school whom he ended up marrying—in Lovell’s case, Marilyn Gerlach. “She has supported me throughout all these years in what I was trying to do,” Lovell told interviewer Glen Swanson. On many of their dates they would sit on the roof together while Lovell pointed out the star constellations. A model rocket buff as a teenager, Lovell had teased information out of his chemistry teacher about rocket fuel chemicals and built three-foot-long rockets with the help of friends. At age sixteen he was lucky to escape serious injury when one of his gunpowder-filled creations exploded. Just like Borman, he was interested in a career that required a college education his family could not afford; Lovell dearly wanted to be a rocket engineer. “I was interested in rockets and astronomy long before the Glenns and Shepards of the world could spell rocket,” he told interviewer Ron Stone. Like several other astronauts, the military would be the only option for achieving his dream. Lovell did not make the selection for the Naval Academy, instead joining the U.S. Navy under a program that allowed him to attend college for two years and study engineering, then receive naval flight training. By then, he had grown as interested in aviation as he had been in rocketry. While still in this program, Lovell was finally admitted to the academy at Annapolis, graduating in 1952 with a degree in science and a senior thesis on the subject of liquid fuel rockets. His lengthy schooling meant that he missed out on combat flying in Korea, but in its place he had received a valuable six years of college training from the navy. After graduation he achieved his goal of being assigned to flight school. Lovell would spend the next six years as a naval aviator and flight instructor, which included the ever-risky assignment of landing on an aircraft carrier at night. “In those days,” he told Stone, “jet training was the epitome of everything, and not too many people were in it. I was very, very lucky . . . and I learned an awful lot. Night flying off carriers separates the men from the boys.” The work was dangerous and challenging, but Lovell wanted to try something even more cutting edge. In 1958 he applied for and obtained a transfer to the Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland, where he was in the same class as future astronauts Wally Schirra and Pete Conrad. Lovell finished first in his class, and all three of them were considered for Mercury astronaut selection, as Schirra told the authors:

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I knew Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell when they came to nasa as they had been classmates of mine at test pilot school—Class 20. Pete and I water-skied a lot back then, and he and I tied for second in our test pilot class. Lovell studied, so he became first! All three of us went through those early Mercury tests together, to see which one of us would survive, and somehow I did. Lovell had some kind of anomaly with his liver at the time of those Mercury tests, so didn’t get picked. Interestingly, Lovell believes that the navy initially thought that he had been selected as a Mercury astronaut. As he told Ron Stone, when he returned to his squadron after being rejected in the final round of medical tests, he immediately received orders to report to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and join the Mercury selectees: I went out to Wright-Patterson, and they were sort of expecting me. The people . . . said “Oh yes, we got seven people, and you’re number seven.” I said, “Oh, I’m great!” The next morning we all went down to breakfast to get ready to start our physical, and a fellow walked in and said, “I’m sorry I’m late. I just came in from Edwards. My name is Gus Grissom.” And he was number seven, and, of course, I wasn’t supposed to be there. . . . I was packing my bags, going back to the squadron! Very, very disappointed. At the time, it was not known whether there would ever be future astronaut groups, so Lovell was upset that he had missed out. But, “before I knew it,” there was a call for a second group, and Lovell was asked by the navy if he wanted to try again. Naturally, he agreed. When selected by nasa for its second astronaut intake, Lovell was the safety engineer for a fighter squadron in Virginia. It wasn’t his choice—he would have preferred to be in flight testing—but, like Gordon Cooper, he had turned the assignment into a positive experience. Lovell was now in the right place to put his rocketry and aviation enthusiasm to work. In contrast to Borman’s spit-and-polish bearing, Lovell was, and still is, a far more outgoing, relaxed, and jovial character who combines hard work with a smooth, pleasant attitude. After decades of relative anonymity, he ironically wound up being one of the best-known astronauts in the mid1990s, a full quarter of a century after his fourth and last spaceflight. The

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reason was a movie made of his autobiography, Lost Moon, chronicling his Apollo 13 mission. Lovell would in fact have one of the quirkier spaceflight careers, twice flying missions that were originally intended for others to fly, losing a place on the Apollo 11 crew in the process, only to finally end up commanding a moon-landing mission that never got to land. First, however, he’d be piloting Gemini 7. The Gemini 7 crew would have to be able to get along well given such a long, intense mission. Luckily, they bonded from the start. Decades later, Lovell could joke, as he did with the authors, about the pairing and the unexciting mission. “Gemini 7, of course, was a two-week mission. I had a very small spacecraft, so it was quite a challenge. Of course, two weeks with Frank Borman anyplace was a challenge! You work for so long to get a spaceflight, I’d have gone up with just about anybody. But we were guinea pigs, absolute guinea pigs.” It was perhaps the most unrewarding mission in the program, but any first spaceflight had to be considered a good one. With the sudden addition of a rendezvous, it had just become a lot more interesting. To accomplish a rendezvous between Gemini 6 and 7, some major problems would have to be overcome. First, fewer than two weeks could separate the spacecraft launches. Though the Russians had been able to accomplish this with relative ease, it was a risky proposition to nasa planners—especially as they would have to use the same launch pad for both missions. nasa’s tracking network had also never been used to track two manned spacecraft before. Doing so would be difficult, but a method was soon formulated to achieve it. Just over a day after the Agena explosion, all of the vital decision-makers were on board with the idea, and it was adopted. It was remarkably fast action for a federal agency, and almost unimaginable today. Flight Controller Gene Kranz still describes it as a “gutsy management decision,” saying the positive attitude of those on the ground toward making it happen was even more impressive than what happened in space. Schirra and Stafford were in favor of pushing the new plans even further, and having a Gemini 6 and 7 crew member change places during an eva. It was wisely decided that this would be too ambitious—a rendezvous would be enough. “We decided it was time to get the theory proved,” Stafford jokes. Once the plan was set, events moved fast. Gemini 6 and its booster were

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carefully dismantled from the pad and stored in pieces, ready for a fast reassembly and launch. Plans were formulated for a speedy pad refurbishment after Gemini 7 lifted off, and the spacecraft’s planned orbital path was changed to make it an easier target. Borman and Lovell maintained a grueling schedule of running and weightlifting, getting themselves in the best possible shape for the upcoming flight. Borman wanted to keep the Gemini 7 mission as simple as possible. He rebuffed attempts to add evas to the flight and to try a docking between the two spacecraft using an inflatable docking collar. “Maybe it’s the military background,” he explained to Harwood. “You always say, ‘Okay, what’s the main objective?’ Let’s make sure the main objective gets done, and put all of your resources into your main push.” When training for the mission, he was concerned less with how he and Lovell would carry out the flight plan than with how they would physically and mentally endure so long a flight in such a confined space. The mission was significantly longer than any astronaut had ever undertaken, and the previous flights had shown that many problems arise as a mission stretches on. For example, it had been proved that it was almost impossible for crew members to sleep in alternate shifts. As the crew of Gemini 5 had also found, trash had to be stowed very carefully or it soon became impossible to work effectively in the cabin. For Gemini 7 another change was attempted: a lesson that nasa would have to relearn many times in its lifetime. Instead of assigning tasks for a precise time, the crew was given more leeway to fit different assignments in where they could. Staying inside a standard Gemini spacesuit for two weeks would also have been extremely uncomfortable, and so a lightweight suit was created that had a soft hood and could be stored far more easily in the spacecraft if taken off. Some astronauts had hoped that on Gemini missions without evas the suits could be dispensed with altogether; but no nasa official was willing to take such a bold step. Instead, it was decided that only one crew member would be allowed to remove his spacesuit at any given time. It had only been forty frantic days since Gemini 6 and its crew had sat on the launch pad ready to go. Now, on 4 December, after a breakfast with Schirra and Stafford, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were inside the Gemini 7 spacecraft, ready to fly ahead of Gemini 6 on a completely redesigned dual mission. From the beginning, all went well. Gemini 7

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launched smoothly and entered its intended orbit. Borman quickly turned the spacecraft around for the first rendezvous procedure of the mission: to stay abreast of their spent Titan booster’s second stage. It was not as easy as planned; frozen fuel flakes poured out of a broken line on the booster, causing it to tumble and shake. This meant Borman was using more fuel than he intended just to stay next to it, and the erratic tumbling was a little too close for comfort. Soon they left the booster behind and began the major purpose of the mission—the medical experiments. These experiments were key to understanding the effects of long-term spaceflight, but they were hard to conduct in such a confined cockpit. The astronauts’ brain waves were studied using scalp sensors, and Lovell and Borman also had to keep meticulous track of how much food they consumed and excreted. They’d even had to bathe in distilled water before the flight so calcium loss through their sweat could be accurately measured postflight. Other experiments involving active piloting were kept to a bare minimum so fuel could be conserved for the planned rendezvous. At first, while performing their medical tasks, both men had to wear their spacesuits. The suits were hot, sweaty, and uncomfortable, and Borman made frequent requests to the ground that they be allowed to take them off. After two days they began to take turns removing them, and eventually they only wore them during the riskier phases of the mission. It made the long flight more comfortable for the astronauts, although the biosensors they wore were still irritating. Conditions in the cramped cabin were worsened early in the mission when a used urine collection bag came apart, and it proved impossible to completely clean up the mess. Lovell later wryly commented that the flight was like being locked in a restroom for two weeks. Meanwhile, on the ground, preparations were continuing at an even more furious pace to ready the pad for a second Gemini launch. Fortunately, the pad had sustained very little damage from the Gemini 7 liftoff. Gemini 6 would now be a quick, stripped-down mission with the primary objective of rendezvousing with Gemini 7; there was little else in the flight plan. On December 12, a mere eight days after Gemini 7 launched, Gemini 6 was back on the pad, with Schirra and Stafford ready for a second try at launching. Once again, they would not lift off—and this time, the risks to them would be far higher.

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As the countdown reached zero and the Titan’s engines ignited, Gemini 6 seemed on its way at last. But moments later, with only one second on the clock, the engines shut down. Had the rocket lifted even a fraction of an inch off the pad, it should now topple and explode. The planned procedure for this kind of shutdown called for the astronauts to pull the abort handle, which would have blasted them out of the spacecraft on ejection seats. The emergency procedure was designed to save their lives, but the astronauts stayed put. As Schirra explained to the authors, he could feel by the seat of his pants that the rocket had not moved. “I would have ejected if I’d had to,” he said. But I had heard the booster liftoff in Atlas, and this Titan didn’t work exactly the same way, so I knew in milliseconds that something had gone wrong, that we had not lifted off. Having had the experience of lifting off in Mercury, I knew the difference. I had my butt working for me. The rule was to eject, to punch us both out. That was kind of a mission rule, and another of those rules that was kind of a what-if. And the what-ifs were not all necessarily in a row, or in the proper sequence. Tom Stafford also described the tense moment, disclosing to the authors one other reason they decided to stay put: We came real close; we got down to three seconds, two seconds, the engines lit off, you feel the booster start to shake, rattle, and roll, build up—and suddenly, at t-0, the engines shut down. We had a little light, which was kind of a liftoff light; there was a computer start and also a timer. They’d told us that when you have that light, the plug has pulled out the bottom of the booster, and that takes fifty pounds of pull force, so you know you’ve lifted off. We had the liftoff signals and everything, but we knew from the seat of our pants that we hadn’t lifted off. We didn’t have that push on our back. Wally’s responsibility—and I was backing him up—was to pull the ejection D-rings. We didn’t do that, which was a good thing. We could feel we hadn’t lifted off, but there was also one other last cue, a very valuable one. We never heard a liftoff call: that’s the final thing you should hear. We always had a fellow astronaut watching the tv camera monitor screen, and he’s the only one who can call liftoff. And that was Al Bean. Al was looking at the booster, and it didn’t move. He didn’t say a thing, and that’s exactly what he should have done—say nothing. It was kind

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of a close call, and I was quoted as saying, “Aw . . . shucks!” And a few other words! It was later determined that an electrical plug had disconnected from the rocket a fraction too early, shutting down the engines before the rocket was able to move. This anomaly activated a clock that was not supposed to start until the vehicle was actually moving. The clock display was visible to the astronauts in the cockpit, and if Schirra had believed it he would have assumed the vehicle was rising and quickly ejected. Instead, Schirra trusted instincts over instruments, and he was correct. Stafford, trusting his commander implicitly, followed his example. Had Schirra and Stafford ejected from the spacecraft, it would have been damaged beyond repair by the ejection-seat rockets, and the rendezvous with Gemini 7 would never have happened. Instead, the duo sat through the tense moment, remaining seated until the rocket was made safe and they could unstrap and exit the spacecraft, over an hour and a half later. “We climbed down, very disappointed,” Stafford recalls. It was a moment that forever impressed their astronaut colleagues. “Schirra had balls,” Gene Cernan would later write. “He was a cold-nerved pilot, by God.” Fixing the plug issue was easy. After a review of the rocket data indicated another anomaly, nasa engineers carefully examined the rocket and found a plastic dust cover in an engine inlet. It was a lucky find, as the cover would very likely have caused other problems during the launch. Most probably, it would have led to a shutdown after two seconds, by which time the rocket would certainly have been moving upward and the use of ejection seats would have been mandatory. “It turned out we had two failures that morning,” recalls Stafford. “Normally, you are not supposed to have a double failure when you fly in space, just like when you fly an aircraft. We got hit with two of them simultaneously. That really saved our lives.” Because of Schirra’s risky decision, the mission was saved. The spacecraft was intact, and nasa was ready to try and launch again. They shaved a day off the usual four-day preparation schedule, and successfully launched on 15 December. It was the third time that the crew had tried to launch, and they rocketed from the pad with a deep sense of relief. Schirra and Stafford, by now highly attuned to the slightest movement of the booster, sensed some shimmying as the rocket lifted off. Schirra

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talked aloud to the booster, urging “For the third time, go!” And the rocket burn was a good one. Borman and Lovell, orbiting far overhead, had a view of Cape Kennedy through their windows but did not spot the moment of launch. They did, however, see the booster’s contrail and knew that they would soon have company in orbit. “On the Gemini-Titan,” according to Stafford, “we were in orbit in five minutes and thirty-five seconds. It was a real hot-rod, riding that! The first launch, you never forget. You had about 6 g’s first stage, then bang, you stage in a fireball; then the second stage, we were out there pushing nearly 8 g’s. You’re pushed back, and you go from 8 g’s to zero-g in a tenth of a second. That was a real ride!” When piloting the spacecraft, Schirra did not have to rely on information from the ground to make a rendezvous. If he needed it, he had all the guidance and navigation equipment on board to fly his way to a precise meeting in orbit unassisted. Gemini became Schirra’s favorite flying vehicle, bringing him the closest of all the spacecraft he flew to that ultimate for a test pilot—the harmony of man and machine: Without a doubt, Gemini was my favorite flight; I appreciated it the most. In Mercury, you couldn’t translate. You could just change attitude. But you were actually flying it like a flying machine in Gemini. Apollo was just too big. I did Apollo, but I enjoyed Gemini. Gemini was just about the right size—it was not much larger than Mercury, really, and it was optimized for both my right and left hand. I did translation with my left hand, which is a very delicate maneuver—a bit like when the shuttle docks with a space station. My left hand was better than my right hand for that. I made tiny, tiny thrusts, and developed that technique to perfection. As he told the authors, Stafford was also impressed by the piloting pleasure of the Gemini craft in comparison to the later Apollo spacecraft: “Gemini was a lot more of a sporty ride than Apollo on launch, and in terms of spacecraft, the real flying was Gemini, too. This was in part because the Gemini was real small, of course, like an f-104 fighter plane.” After performing four maneuvers soon after reaching orbit, Schirra turned on the radar and locked on to his target, still hundreds of miles away. “It was as if we were two horses on a racetrack,” Stafford would later state. Five hours into the mission, Gemini 7 was only a hundred miles

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away, and to Schirra the other spacecraft looked like a bright star. Stafford gave his commander precise navigational guidance, verifying it with radar data from the ground, and the duo’s months of training paid off perfectly. Less than six hours into the mission, Schirra was already braking as he sidled up to within 120 feet of Gemini 7, with plenty of maneuvering fuel still in his tanks. The rendezvous had been even easier to carry out than in the simulators. The Gemini program had just achieved its most important objective. Borman and Lovell had watched them slowly approach, surprised by the bright flames of Gemini 6 ’s thruster firings. “I can still recall them coming up from below at nighttime, their thrusters firing as we came together,” Lovell recounts. The Gemini 7 crew needed some excitement at this point in the mission, and the rendezvous gave it to them. Borman had remarked a few days before that “the days seem to be lengthening a little . . . we’re getting a little crummy.” Considering how the spacecraft smelled after eleven days, Borman’s comment was a tactful understatement. There was another surprise for both crews when they drew even closer and took a good look at each others’ spacecraft. Neither had disconnected cleanly from their boosters, and both were trailing the separation cords behind them; some of the cords were sixteen feet long. “It was quite a shock when we saw all the dangling particles,” Schirra recalled. With so much fuel still in the tanks, Gemini 6 remained the active partner in the rendezvous as a variety of station-keeping and fly-around maneuvers were practiced. “We were the target craft,” Lovell explained, “while Gemini 6 rendezvoused with us.” The spacecraft remained together for more than three orbits, which included remaining very close to each other in the darkness of the night side of the planet. For Schirra, it was the high point of his nasa career—the moment when he could feel the spacecraft respond crisply to his every command, as he flew it precisely around Gemini 7. “The ground was talking in terms of feet,” Schirra explained, “but we were closer—six to eight inches. That’s how deftly the spacecraft could be controlled.” Stafford was also very impressed with the handling of their spacecraft as he and Schirra took turns flying. As they drifted nose to nose with Gemini 7 Schirra quipped that the only downside was the view; he had to look at the tired-looking Borman and Lovell through the windows.

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In an orbital meeting of three naval aviators and a pragmatic West Pointer who disliked practical jokes, it was time, Stafford told the authors, to have some fun at Borman’s expense: It was right around the first of December when we started planning this. We were sitting around the crew quarters, we were super trained; there was Al Shepard, a Naval Academy grad, Wally Schirra, Naval Academy, and myself. I don’t know which one of us came up with it—I think it was Al Shepard—he said “How about, if everything works out right, let’s put up a sign, Tom, in your window, a blue sign with a gold Beat Army.” So in orbit I said, “Jim, the doctors are concerned about your condition: you have been up here longer than anybody has before in space, and they want to check your visual acuity. Take a picture of this and say what you see!” So with that I put up the Beat Army sign, and he shot a picture of it. It ended up on the front page of the Washington Post a few days later. You can see that plaque in the Naval Academy museum back east. It’s the highest Beat Army rally we’ve ever had! As Borman later related, “Wally was always one to inject some levity into the program. . . . He has that little quirk of being able to include some fun with things. I never had that. I didn’t think much about the ‘Beat Army’ sign. . . . I guess it is just the way I am built. . . . I wanted to do the mission and I didn’t care about the other crap. . . . All the funny fun and games, it was a bunch of crap as far as I’m concerned.” Though there had been time for joking, it had been a busy day for the Gemini 6 crew, and all too soon Schirra and Stafford thrusted away from Gemini 7 to the safe distance of ten miles, where they enjoyed a wellearned sleep. They had made rendezvous look easy, but in reality only a huge amount of preparation had enabled them to pull it off so masterfully. Gemini 6 was Schirra’s kind of mission—it involved a lot of piloting, and it was relatively short. After little more than a day in space, with the rendezvous objective a stunning success, they readied themselves for the return to Earth. Schirra was also feeling the effects of a head cold, which made him want to return even more. On his next spaceflight, he would not have the luxury of a fast return when suffering from a stuffy head. It would not be a Wally Schirra space mission, however, without one last quip. Tom Stafford radioed Gemini 7 and the ground and excitedly reported, “We have an object: looks like a satellite going from north to

Postflight, the Gemini 6 crew of Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford on the recovery carrier uss Wasp. Courtesy nasa.

south, probably in polar orbit. . . . Looks like he might be going to reenter soon.” Astounded mission controllers were mystified at this report of a potential ufo, and were even more astonished when Stafford next reported that he was picking up communications from the unknown craft, which he would relay to the ground. As Stafford explains, it was a perfect prank for the time of year: That was just before Christmas time, and about one round before retrofire I called ground control and told them we had something coming towards us, which looked like it was coming from the north to the south. The CapCom was getting excited, and I told them the angular rate was nearly zero, and this thing was heading straight towards us. “It’s getting nearer,” I said. “We can hear some noise: listen.” And about that time, Wally played “Jingle Bells” on a little harmonica, and I jingled some little bells. You can see them in the National Air and Space Museum, in the gallery upstairs. With a final comment to Gemini 7 from Schirra—“We’ll see you on the beach”—Gemini 6 began its reentry. Schirra flew manually for much of the journey down, banking the spacecraft to reduce lift and range. “In Gem-

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ini, you could change your flight path by rotating,” Schirra told Roy Neal. “You were actually controlling it through the atmosphere on reentry.” On 16 December they splashed down in the western Atlantic Ocean, where they were recovered by helicopters from the aircraft carrier uss Wasp. “We were really a happy bunch of fellows,” Stafford recalls, “although it had taken us three launch attempts to get off.” Three days later, the carrier would collect another Gemini spacecraft. For Borman and Lovell in Gemini 7 an already tiresome mission grew steadily worse. With almost three days left to go, they now had nothing left to look forward to except homecoming. As Tom Stafford would describe it, “two weeks in a Gemini . . . was like spending two weeks eating, sleeping, working, and going to the bathroom stuffed into the front seat of a sports car wearing an overcoat.” The crew ate food that was covered in wax to help preserve it, hating the taste and the unpleasant feeling of wax coating their mouths. Adding to the discomfort, their skin was flaking in the dry, pressurized atmosphere, and their hair was full of dead skin particles. They had also lost a toothbrush, and were forced to share the remaining one. “We were a pretty odorous pair,” Borman would later recall. With the rendezvous over, at least the spacesuits could be removed again. “My grandkids say that I spent two weeks around the Earth in my underwear,” Lovell jokes. Both crewmen, now with noticeable beards, occupied themselves reading novels. Borman later admitted that they were bored. “We were waiting for time to pass . . . checking off days . . . We did not have enough attitude control fuel to maintain an attitude so we just drifted and tumbled for days at a time. And that is rather frustrating.” He found those last three days to be endlessly long and tiring, and says his “sense of mission” was the only way he could stand the boredom and fly for the full duration. As Jim Lovell told the authors, “Frank says that his Gemini 7 flight was worse than our Apollo 8 flight, in terms of his two flights. Apollo 8, of course, was such an historic mission, so many things were happening, whereas Gemini 7 was just really, hang in there. It was tedious work. Frank really wanted to come down after about twelve days, because our fuel cells were really dying, and we were losing a lot of our reaction control thrusters. I argued with him: told him not to worry.” As they circled the Earth

Glad to be home: Jim Lovell and Frank Borman grin with relief after their long-duration Gemini 7 mission. Courtesy nasa.

together, all alone, they sang a Jim Reeves country-and-western song to each other, over and over again. Borman later recounted, “We were too tired even to take each other’s pulse.” Both of them had already decided that, immediately after splashdown, they wanted to get out of the cramped cockpit instead of waiting to be lifted to the deck of the recovery carrier. At last, the two weeks were up. Relying mostly on instruments and making minor adjustments to the course the computer was flying, Borman and Lovell flew a smooth reentry, working together as a team so one person could look at the instrumentation while the other checked the horizon through the window. As they did so, an experience that Borman compares to “flying in a neon tube,” they fought off the deadening effect of returning gravity. After two weeks in space, the weight was uncomfortable, but bearable. Deploying their parachutes, they hit the ocean with a satisfying thump. Fighting off a dizzy feeling, Borman tried to take off the annoying spacesuit, but found it too difficult a task after two weeks of weightlessness. They soon began to feel better, however, and by the time they were aboard the recovery carrier uss Wasp they were able to walk unaided. The doctors who examined them were delighted. They were in much better shape than had been feared; there now seemed to be no physical obstacle

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to flying long missions to the moon. “The only thing I really felt after two weeks like that was that our leg muscles were shot,” Borman recalled. nasa rounded out 1965 with five successful Gemini missions completed and a huge number of important objectives achieved, all vital to future space plans. Borman and Lovell, who had endured the misery of longduration flight to prove it could be done, would get their reward. They would end up being on the very first flight out to the moon together. Despite the launch setbacks and last-minute change of plans, or perhaps because of them and the initiative they inspired, the rendezvous of Gemini 6 and 7 was an incredible achievement for the program. “The mission will be there in history forever,” Stafford stated decades later. And as Jim Lovell told the authors, the rendezvous success was the culmination of a fast and effective process: “On Gemini 4, when McDivitt and Ed White tried to do the rendezvous, they kept circling around, because they didn’t realize the aspects of orbital mechanics, where you retrograde to get up there, and you posigrade to go down—all that sort of stuff. It took a little while for that type of rendezvous to be developed. Gemini 6 and 7 was a real rendezvous—by that time we understood orbital mechanics. We completed the first rendezvous in space.” As for the medical experiments, they had also been very important, but the astronauts were far less likely to enthuse about them. For Borman, it seems, Gemini 7 was enough for one lifetime. In his memoirs, former scientist-astronaut Brian O’Leary vividly recalled a meeting the astronaut corps had with nasa Administrator Jim Webb two years after the Gemini 7 flight. According to O’Leary, when one of the other scientist-astronauts tried to ask Webb a question about science in future manned space plans, Borman interrupted loudly and without warning: “To hell with the scientific community!” nasa looked hopefully toward a year of similar success in 1966. Instead, the first flight of the new year saw their first major mission failure, and the most dangerous moment astronauts had ever faced in space. Now that two Gemini spacecraft had rendezvoused in orbit, it was time for nasa to try to accomplish the original objective of the Gemini 6 mission—a docking with an unmanned Agena target. The Gemini 8 mission was scheduled to last for three days, and in addition to the docking plans

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included an ambitious eva. The spacewalk was to last for two hours, with the pilot strapping on an Extravehicular Support Package (esp). Then, using a maneuvering gun, he would float over to the Agena, while remaining tethered to the Gemini spacecraft. Once there, he would remove a package from the side of the spacecraft that had been designed to detect micrometeorites and test a special power tool. Having accomplished these tasks, the spacewalker would then float to the end of his long tether and be pulled for a distance by the thrusting Gemini spacecraft. It was an ambitious leap from the relatively easy floating eva conducted on the Gemini 4 mission. Dave Scott, chosen as pilot and spacewalker for the mission, put in a huge number of training hours preparing for the difficult assignment. David Randolph Scott was born on 6 June 1932 on an air force base in San Antonio, Texas, the son of an air force general. His family life was one of strict discipline and numerous rules, but Scott seemed to happily accept these facts and was keen to follow his father’s career path. He attended a rigidly strict military school, where his father pushed him hard to be assertive and successful. Scott was accepted to the University of Michigan but only stayed a year because he earned a chance to achieve his ambition to attend West Point. His intensely competitive streak enabled him to graduate fifth in his class in 1954. Joining the air force and receiving his wings the following year, he served in a tactical fighter squadron in the Netherlands, marrying the daughter of another air force general in 1959. He then resumed his academic studies in 1960. Scott had been told that obtaining a degree was the best way to get the best test-piloting jobs, so he earned a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in interplanetary navigation. In 1962 he achieved his wish and returned to piloting, attending the air force’s test pilot school at Edwards. Graduating in 1963 as the best pilot in his class, he moved up into the Aerospace Research Pilot School, also at Edwards, where future spacefarers were groomed. Possessing the perfect background for the job, he was selected to join nasa in 1963 as part of the third group of astronauts. He saw the assignment as less of a career move than an “evolution”—a natural move for a promising test pilot. He planned to fly in space a couple of times and then return to a more mainstream air force career. At nasa, Scott was quickly recognized as being one of the best pilots in

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his astronaut group. Very highly ranked by his peers, they described him as “All-American,” and also joked that Scott came closest to the iconic persona of the tall, rugged, patriotic Cold War hero and was the one who looked most like the movie version of a daring astronaut. Over thirty years later, Scott still has that air about him; although time has altered his features, he now bears a striking resemblance to another American icon, the late actor Lee Marvin. Given Scott’s test-piloting credentials, it was little surprise to his peers that he was the first of that group to receive a flight assignment. He didn’t even have to serve on a backup crew first. Scott had concentrated on spacecraft guidance and navigation during his training, which fit the Gemini 8 mission objectives perfectly. Indeed, Mike Collins later wrote that seeing Scott picked first reassured him that nasa knew what it was doing. Commanding the mission would be another space rookie—Group 2 astronaut Neil Armstrong. Armstrong was the last of his selection group to be given a prime crew flight assignment. He had in fact been waiting so long that he was now commanding a member of the next group. Although Scott found Armstrong “a taskmaster” at times, the two had a great mutual respect and worked well together. Armstrong has become one of the bestknown personalities of spaceflight, primarily because he happened to be in the right place at the right time, picking up command of the most famous Apollo flight of them all. In the context of his astronaut peers at the time, however, there was nothing especially remarkable about him. His relative blandness could almost be said to be his most distinguishing feature. Armstrong has spent his life following his own interests and instincts, not allowing fame to change him at all. Four decades after he first flew in space, he comes across like an amiable college professor who loves his subject and would be happy to discuss it all day with his students. As he said to reporters in 1989, “I am still hemming and hawing in front of the cameras just like I did twenty years ago.” His mild manners and modest demeanor color Armstrong’s attitude toward himself: he loves aerospace engineering and sees his astronaut career only in the wider context of advancing that technical field. He’s a keen enthusiast of the airplanes and cars of the 1930s, and one almost has a feeling that he would have preferred to have been an adult in that era, when one small workshop could lovingly design and

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craft a cutting-edge vehicle, in contrast to the tens of thousands needed for Gemini and Apollo. The other, sterner and warier side of Armstrong’s personality sometimes comes to the fore when unwanted demands of fame invade his relatively private life. Like John Glenn, Armstrong has a profoundly deep sense of right and wrong, but an occasionally overdefensive sense of propriety has led him in the past to rebuke and frustrate some well-intentioned people. “Neil doesn’t waste words,” Mike Collins once revealed, “but it doesn’t mean he can’t use them.” As pad leader Guenter Wendt also noted, Armstrong has never liked other people telling him what to do. There are few who don’t respect him, but for some his refusal to do anything except on his own terms can seem overly stubborn. Neil Alden Armstrong was born on a farm near Wapakoneta, Ohio, on 5 August 1930. His father was an auditor for the state’s county records, and so the family moved all the time—six times in his first six years. A bookish child, he showed an unusually early academic intelligence, so much so that he was able to skip second grade completely. He learned to fly before he could drive, making his first flight at the age of six and obtaining his pilot’s license on his sixteenth birthday. He became an aviator primarily because he wanted to learn how to improve aircraft design based on experience; he’d decided he wanted to be an aircraft designer while still in elementary school. When other teenagers were out having fun, Armstrong was earnestly building a wind tunnel in the family basement, studying calculus outside of school time, and collecting vintage air magazines, which he kept well into adulthood. “I filled notebooks with scraps of information about makes of aircraft, specifications, and performances,” he would later admit. Not only was he shy; he also looked strikingly younger than he was. Armstrong once said that when he was sixteen he looked like a twelve-year-old. He was, unsurprisingly, never particularly athletic in school, and instead played the horn in the school band. His brother later told reporters that Neil rarely dated and that when he left for college he was “immature and withdrawn.” He may sound like the ultimate nerdy teenager, and in many ways he was, but he also had a firm wish to do something record-breaking. By the time Armstrong became a pilot, however, he felt he had missed his chance to do anything dramatic in the aviation field. It seemed that all of

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the great record-setting flights around the globe had been completed; he was, he believed, a generation too late. History would soon prove Armstrong wrong. While studying aeronautical engineering in college just after World War II, he benefited from the huge technical strides the conflict had spurred—in particular, the jet engine. He was only able to go to college because the navy was paying for his tuition, and in 1949, after just a year and a half in college, Armstrong was pulled out for active duty as a fighter pilot. The nerdy young man would now have to grow up whether he liked it or not. “I was very young, very green,” Armstrong would later say of that time. He was assigned to a squadron fighting in the Korean War, and quickly became a seasoned combat aviator, flying seventy-eight combat missions from aircraft carriers. Resigning from the navy and returning to college in 1952, he graduated three years later with a degree in his beloved aeronautical engineering. He then went to work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (naca), the aviation precursor to nasa. Transferred to the naca station at Edwards Air Force Base, he began work there as a civilian test pilot. His duties included flying simulated launch and landing approaches for the x-20, a proposed air force winged spacecraft. In 1960, he was assigned to the program as a pilot, although there was as yet no x-20 to fly. In the meantime, he also flew the x-15, the rocket plane that was capable of brief suborbital spaceflights. Armstrong, however, was never permitted to take it that high. “Neil had been considered one of the weaker stick-and-rudder men,” Mike Collins would write, “but the very best when it came to understanding the machine’s design and how it operated.” Now married to his first wife, Janet, Armstrong characteristically chose not to live in any of the towns near the base. Instead, the family lived in a former forest ranger’s cabin, in the foothills of the nearby mountains. “It was one of nature’s quiet hideaways,” he would later describe, adding that it was “an outpost of serenity.” Living away from everyone else and flying solo in the most cutting-edge aircraft, Armstrong was in engineering heaven; he described these experiences as “the most fascinating time of my life.” By this time he could see that becoming an astronaut would allow him to further explore his love of engineering by going beyond the “atmospheric fringes and into deep space work; . . . throughout my seventeen years at naca and nasa, a very large percentage of my time was involved in real engineering work.”

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When he joined nasa’s astronaut second group in 1962, much press coverage was made of him being one of two “civilian astronauts.” In fact, of course, he’d had an active military career, including combat duty. The other so-called “civilian” in his group, Elliot See, had also been a naval aviator. The two men were assigned together as the backup crew for the Gemini 5 mission. Armstrong continued his somewhat monastic lifestyle when he moved to Houston. “Probably not the most charismatic individual; . . . most would agree that he did not make friends easily,” Guenter Wendt would later write. Reporters noted that Armstrong “sought utter privacy” and not just from media intrusions. One writer noted that he was so reticent that even his parents did not know what his philosophical and religious beliefs were. Another, a little less tactfully, wrote that Armstrong “surrendered words about as happily as a hound allowed meat to be pulled out of his teeth.” Socializing or sharing thoughts about anything but the job at hand was never going to be something he cared about. “I am not very articulate,” he told reporters at the beginning of the new millennium. “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer.” As Gemini 8’s launch day approached, there was concern within nasa over the Agena rocket’s reliability. One had blown up in a test only a few weeks before. Mission Control instructed the astronauts to “get out fast” if the Agena showed any signs of malfunction during their flight. But all began well on 16 March when the Atlas-Agena target vehicle launched successfully after a one-day delay. Its trajectory was a little low at first, but the engines on both Atlas and Agena worked efficiently, with none of the problems that had disrupted the prior attempt. A suitable orbit was attained. Given a definite target, Armstrong quipped, “Beautiful, we will take that one.” Gemini 8 followed the Agena into orbit an hour and forty minutes later, exactly on time. It was the first time that two space vehicles had simultaneously counted down and launched at the precise second planned, and all looked good for another successful rendezvous. Schirra and Stafford had demonstrated how to catch a target in space; now the Gemini 8 crew followed much the same procedure when chasing their Agena, making nine maneuvers to synchronize their orbit. During the first orbit, on the dark side of the Earth, the crew observed their thrusters firing, compensat-

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ing for an unwanted movement. It resembled the situation encountered on Gemini 3: the radiator was venting and turning the spacecraft. It was not a serious problem, however, and the mission controllers paid it little attention. In between making the maneuvers, Armstrong and Scott even took time to eat a meal and to look out of the windows at the Earth below. Armstrong looked down with particular interest at Edwards Air Force Base, where he had spent so much time as an aviator. As they drew to within eighty-seven miles of the Agena, the two astronauts spotted it shining in the sunlight. Drawing ever closer, Armstrong made slight braking maneuvers, trusting his eyes while Scott read the radar readings to him. Eventually, the two spacecraft were moving at the same precise speed and in the same orbit. Less than six hours after launch, Gemini 8 was flying in formation with the Agena, with only 150 feet separating them. For half an hour, as Armstrong kept Gemini 8 in precise position, Scott carefully scrutinized the Agena, making sure that it looked stable and intact. With everything looking perfect, Armstrong gently coaxed their spacecraft to within three feet of the target, and then slowly, carefully, he eased into the docking collar. “Flight, we are docked!” he reported, adding happily that the docking was “really a smoothie—no noticeable oscillations at all.” For the first time, two spacecraft had docked in orbit, and one of the major objectives of the Gemini program had been achieved. With a communications station in Zanzibar closed because of political troubles, however, Gemini 8 was out of contact with ground controllers during the dramatic, life-threatening events that followed. The Agena had been instructed to fire its control thrusters in order to keep the two spacecraft at the same angle relative to the direction of orbital travel. Agena rockets had malfunctioned before, and the flight controllers had not been able to verify this Agena’s program commands before losing contact. So as Gemini 8 was passing out of communications range, the astronauts were instructed to turn the Agena thrusters off and take control of the spacecraft if such a malfunction occurred. Dave Scott commanded the Agena to turn both spacecraft to the right, a maneuver that initially seemed perfect. The docked spacecraft were in darkness, so it was only by glancing at his cockpit instruments that Scott noticed they had yawed thirty degrees from their planned position. Armstrong also

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took a look, and confirmed the yaw with his own instrument indicator. Unless both indicators were malfunctioning, the yaw was real. Armstrong carefully moved the two spacecraft back into the correct position using Gemini’s thrusters. However, as soon as he released the hand control, the joined spacecraft resumed a slow, unwanted yaw. With no telemetry information from Gemini or Agena available via Mission Control to explain the motion, the astronauts had to analyze the problem on their own. Both astronauts felt the problem probably lay with the Agena’s control system thrusters, so Scott sent and continued to send shutdown commands to Agena’s attitude control. This, however, only made the situation worse; as well as yawing, the connected vehicles now began to spin together, faster and faster. Worried that the docking adapter connecting them might break under the strain, they used their thrusters to slow the spin enough to disengage from the Agena. Half an hour after they had first docked, Scott hit the emergency release, while Armstrong fired the thrusters, pushing the spacecraft backward and away from the Agena. The astronauts did not know it at the time, but the thruster problem was in their spacecraft, not the Agena. Now separated from the other vehicle, things only got worse aboard Gemini 8. With its total mass now suddenly reduced almost in half with the Agena detached, it began to roll to the left and tumble even faster. Soon it was rotating once a second. Items that had previously floated in the cabin now stuck to the spacecraft walls due to the centrifugal force. The cause, Armstrong and Scott surmised, was one of Gemini 8’s thrusters firing on and off intermittently. They had little time to identify which one. Armstrong had not initially believed their Gemini craft was the culprit because its thrusters normally made a loud cracking sound when they fired. In this emergency, he hadn’t heard anything. Armstrong and Scott’s vision began to blur, and their heads banged together. Scott later recalled that both of them were getting close to the onset of tunnel vision: a dangerous development. Without their eyesight, they would have been helpless. He also felt he was close to blacking out, after which he knew it would have been all over for them. But there was no time to think about such things—there was only time to try and find a solution. “A test pilot’s job is identifying problems and getting the answers,” Armstrong would later relate. “We never doubted that we would find an answer—but we had to find it fast.”

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The spacecraft was once again within range of ground stations, but as the radio antenna was spinning with the spacecraft, communication with the ground was almost impossible. Chris Kraft in Mission Control later admitted to feeling frightened and helpless, having two astronauts “alone up there with an out-of-control spacecraft.” Armstrong and Scott, however, were both highly experienced test pilots and were used to solving problems independently. The ground could not have helped them anyway. As Scott later compared, if a test pilot gets into a spin in an airplane only the pilot can work his or her way out of it; the ground cannot help. On previous missions, the astronauts and mission controllers had worked well together as a team. This time, all the ground could do was hope the crew knew their spacecraft well enough. Armstrong was admittedly not an intuitive pilot. “It has never been a strong point,” he once told reporters. His engineerlike credo was instead to “interpret the problem properly, then attack it.” The astronauts were now also facing the grim possibilities of colliding with the Agena while rotating wildly or their spacecraft disintegrating as it spun beyond its structural strength. “We were concerned that the stresses might be getting dangerously high,” Armstrong would explain. “The spacecraft might break apart.” With blurred vision making it difficult to see individual thruster switches, they had no choice but to shut down all sixteen of the oams thrusters, which were used to change orbit and attitude. Now, at least, they would not roll any faster. However, with no atmosphere or gravitational effect to slow the relentless tumbling, simply stopping the thrust did not slow them at all. With no time left to work out which oams thruster had caused the problem, Armstrong had to use the spacecraft’s other set of thrusters, the Reaction Control System (rcs), to halt the rotation before they both lost consciousness. Finally, the spacecraft’s roll slowed, then stopped. When Armstrong began to individually test the oams thrusters, the rolling began once more, so he shut them off again. Something was short-circuiting within the system that controlled them, causing a twenty-three-pound thruster to fire at first intermittently, then continuously. The mission rules stated that once the rcs reentry thruster control system had been activated, Gemini had no choice but to return to Earth immediately. “I made that decision reluctantly,” Armstrong reported, “be-

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cause once the decision was made, the mission had to be terminated. That excluded Dave’s eva . . . and that hurt.” Having trained for so long, especially for the eva, both Scott and Armstrong had hoped to continue the mission. But much of the fuel reserved for reentry had already been used saving their lives, and only one set of thrusters could now be relied upon. It was wise to return as soon as possible. Armstrong and Scott hurriedly packed away a floating pile of items, including bulky equipment that had been designed for the now-cancelled eva and was never intended for return to Earth. A fleet of recovery ships rushed into position as the two astronauts quickly prepared for an early return during their seventh orbit. Armstrong, concerned that he might make a navigational error that would lead them to return far off course, asked Scott to double-check everything he did. “Being an old navy guy, I much preferred coming down in the water to coming down in Red China at the time,” he’d later explain. After being in space for almost eleven hours, the Gemini 8 spacecraft successfully splashed down in an emergency recovery zone in the western Pacific Ocean, 500 miles east of Okinawa. At first, the recovery forces were too distant for them to make contact, but soon the ships grew close enough. Over three hours after the troubled spacecraft had hit the ocean, the uss Leonard Mason picked up the disappointed astronaut duo. After their long wait in the hot spacecraft, both men were nauseous from the ocean swells. It had been a frustratingly brief mission, and yet it was hard for nasa to be completely disappointed. After all, another historic first—the first docking of two spacecraft—had been accomplished. “The whole program learned something,” Scott told reporters after the flight. “It proved that the systems we have are good systems and that the backup capabilities are there. It showed that if things go wrong and we have major problems that we can take care of the problems.” Flight Controller Gene Kranz felt there was even more to learn. “We were just lucky,” he stated. “And luck’s got no business in spaceflight. So we had to eliminate that luck component.” Skill had been even more important than luck, and the flight had publicly demonstrated the test-piloting skills of both Armstrong and Scott. When the spacecraft had begun its wild tumbling, Julian Scheer, nasa’s

Neil Armstrong (left) and Dave Scott, crew of the troubled Gemini 8. Courtesy nasa.

first public affairs director, had been concerned that he was about to hear Armstrong and Scott’s last words. Listening to the tapes of the dangerous moments shortly afterward, he was amazed to hear how calm and in control the duo sounded at all times. As Gus Grissom wrote, “Gemini 8 reminded the public, briefly, that spaceflight was not yet as simple as a ride on a trolley car.” Frank Borman put it even more starkly when he said, “they damned near became the first U.S. casualties in space.” Scott, in particular, had shown incredible presence of mind during the unexpected events of the Gemini 8 mission. Even in the middle of an emergency, out of contact with Mission Control, he had thought to reenable ground control command of the Agena before the two vehicles separated. This meant that for the following two days, the ground could thoroughly test the Agena’s thrusters and ensure that it had not been to blame. The Agena was in good enough shape that it would remain in orbit for another visit by a second Gemini crew. The skill Scott had shown was reflected in the fact that, only five days after returning from Gemini 8, he was assigned to an Apollo crew. And yet, not everyone was full of praise for the duo. Just as Gus Grissom and Scott Carpenter had endured a whispering campaign after their Mercury missions, there were those who believed the mission failure might

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be due to something the pilots had or had not done. “There was some talk behind our backs,” Scott wrote in his memoirs, “by those who thought we had screwed up . . . unnecessarily turned on the re-entry control system, which aborted the mission.” If this was the case, it certainly didn’t affect Scott’s assignments at all. Armstrong initially had a far less promising assignment: a dead-end job backing up Gemini 11. This meant that he would neither fly Gemini again nor be immediately available for an early Apollo crew. If it had not been for a lengthy delay in the Apollo program due to the death of some of his colleagues, it is possible that he would have been waiting for a second flight for quite some time. As it was, Neil Armstrong would ultimately do very well with his next, and last, prime crew flight assignment.

3. The Ballet of Weightlessness No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience. John Locke

It had taken eight Gemini missions to achieve, but it seemed that rendezvous and docking was now, if not perfected, at least understood. Rendezvous and docking still had a critical role to play in the final four Gemini missions, but now there was another function that the astronauts had to master: spacewalking. Unfortunately, nasa had no real understanding of the eva difficulties they would soon face. On Gemini 4, a super-fit Ed White had made it look relatively easy, while the Soviets were keeping tight-lipped about the extreme eva difficulties experienced by Alexei Leonov on Voskhod 2. Dave Scott had planned to conduct an ambitious eva on the curtailed Gemini 8 mission, but it had not been possible. Gemini 9 had some catching up to do. Yet it seemed that nothing was ever going to go as planned for this flight. Originally, four astronauts were considered for Gemini 9’s prime and backup crews; only one of them would be alive on the day the mission launched. On the last day of October 1964, Group 3 astronaut Ted Freeman was undertaking a routine flight out over the Gulf of Mexico in order to maintain his proficiency in one of nasa’s t-38 jet airplanes. He was asked to abort his first landing back at Houston’s Ellington Field, as there was other airborne traffic in the area. On his second approach a flock of snow geese intersected his flight path, and one bird smashed violently into his airplane. The Plexiglas windscreen shattered and was ingested into the engine, which promptly choked and flamed out. Freeman managed to dead-stick the t-38 away from a populated area, but he ejected too late to

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save himself. His parachute did not have time to fully deploy, and he hit the ground at high speed. Had he lived, Freeman was said to have been in line for assignment to the backup crew for the Gemini 9 mission, together with Tom Stafford. With Freeman gone, astronaut Gene Cernan was assigned to the backup crew, supporting prime crew astronaut rookies Elliot See and Charlie Bassett. On 28 February 1966, both the prime and backup crews for Gemini 9 were flying into St. Louis, Missouri, to inspect their spacecraft, then under final construction at the McDonnell plant. Bassett and See were flying in one airplane, with Stafford and Cernan at their wing in a second t-38. Conditions at the field were atrocious, with rain, heavy cloud cover, and blinding snow flurries. Both airplanes missed their first landing attempt and aborted. Stafford and Cernan flew back up into the clouds, but See decided to attempt a visual approach. Unfortunately, he was traveling too low and slow, and one of the t-38’s wings clipped the top of the threestory building in which their spacecraft was undergoing completion. The airplane slammed into the roof, bounced, and exploded, before tumbling into a courtyard parking area. See and Bassett were killed instantly. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the backup crew of Stafford and Cernan became the prime crew, and the follow-on effect of this changed crew assignment would later directly influence the selection of crewmembers for the Apollo missions. It had thus taken the deaths of three men in line ahead of him for Gene Cernan to end up as a prime crew member. In some ways, it is characteristic of Cernan to end up somewhere he never expected to be. Even today his enormous energy and enthusiasm is underpinned by a bashful sense of modesty. “If you’re not careful you feel like you are some kind of hero,” he told the authors. “I don’t want to feel that way.” Gene Cernan looks and sounds like the kind of presidential politician you only ever see in Hollywood movies. He is sharp, sincere, and can charm anyone, from a small gathering to a crowd of thousands. He talks from the heart and is skilled in working an audience up to a standing ovation. Yet, unlike many real-life politicians, he is never too slick. He is genuinely at ease in the highest social circles and believes in the words he uses so convincingly during public speeches. He never quite seems to accept the mixture of skill and circumstance that allowed him to have a successful

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astronaut career. “I had ambitions and dreams,” he confessed, “but I also made a lot of mistakes. Even today, I sometimes wonder, why me?” Eugene Andrew Cernan was born on 14 March 1934 in Chicago, and says he “came from an average blue-collar family.” He was an “unplanned Depression baby,” with a father who lost his job soon after his wife gave birth. It was not a luxurious upbringing. During World War II, Cernan began to make plans for his future while watching newsreels at his local movie theater; the idea of being a fighter pilot greatly appealed to him. Cernan’s father encouraged him to become an engineer, but there was not enough money in the family to send him to the best school, mit. Instead, he attended Purdue University, in the year behind Neil Armstrong, from which he received a degree in electrical engineering in 1956. He was only able to attend because the navy gave him a partial scholarship. Cernan still dreamed of being a naval aviator flying to and from aircraft carriers, yet he had still never flown an airplane, not even as a passenger. His first experience would be as a passenger on a flight back to college when he was already a student. Luckily, his career instincts were correct: when he was finally able to fly naval aircraft, he loved it as much as he expected to. Going on active navy duty after graduation, Cernan quickly entered naval flight school, becoming a naval aviator in December 1957. He then served as a fighter pilot with attack squadrons in San Diego. “San Diego is sort of a second home for me,” he told the authors. “It is where I spent most of my Navy life.” It was while he was in San Diego that he really began thinking seriously of becoming an astronaut: I remember that day well: it was 5 May 1961. I was stationed at Miramar, just back from my second cruise. I was getting married the next day, but I was not sure what I was going to do with my life at that point in time. That day, Alan Shepard, first American in space, flew little more than fifteen or sixteen minutes. And Al became my hero. The whole world was watching America’s response to the Soviets then, and I remember after Al went up someone said, “Gene, how would you like to do that?” And I said, “I’d love it—boy, just give me a chance!” I was not ready to do something like that, but I’d love to do it, I said. But by the time I’d be ready, I thought, by the time I met all of the re-

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quirements and was qualified, was good enough—there won’t be anything left to do in space exploration. But that was not true. Because it was only ten years, ten years to the month that I was backup commander for Apollo 14, backing up that same Alan Shepard. By 1961 his obligation to the U.S. Navy was at an end, but that same year Cernan received an enticing offer—the navy would allow him to return to college, and he could continue to fly jets. Cernan agreed to the deal, and in 1963 he earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, while also interning at a rocket propulsion facility. He was hoping that the degree would make him more likely to gain entry to the navy’s test pilot school and was about to begin a third year of college. Then, to his immense surprise, he discovered that the navy wanted to put his name forward for the next round of nasa astronaut selections. After an exhausting series of interviews, he was told that he had made it; nasa had included him in its third group of astronauts. It took Cernan quite a while to really believe that he was there. At first, he felt like an “imposter astronaut,” sharing the same offices with his Mercury idols. He even asked them for their autographs. He was delighted to be assigned to the Gemini 9 backup crew, as the rotation system then in place meant he should fly the twelfth and last Gemini mission. “Tom Stafford and I, as different as night and day, became like brothers because we spent so much time together training,” he would later write. Cernan felt it was quite an honor to be backing up Charlie Bassett. He considered him one of the best test pilots in the astronaut corps. As well as admiring his professional skills, Cernan also liked Bassett as a close personal friend, and their families spent a lot of off-duty time together. To get into shape for what might be a demanding spacewalk, the two of them lifted weights together in the gym almost every day. Working as a very close team, the duo did everything they could to prepare for a complex and ambitious mission. Within hours of Bassett’s death, Cernan received official word that he was to replace him. He attended Bassett’s funeral and then threw himself back into the training with renewed vigor. Tom Stafford was inheriting a mission under difficult circumstances, but there was not really time to think about that. The mission was going to push Gemini’s rendezvous and

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spacewalking capabilities into new areas. “It was a very ambitious flight,” Stafford told the authors. We would do three different types of rendezvous. One would be a faster rendezvous than Schirra and I had done before; it would be standard to what we would use around the moon. We would do an overhead rendezvous—always before we had come up from below, with the light of sunrise or the stars in the background, so it was like flying an instrument landing system approach: it was a very easy course of reference. Here, we’d come from above, with all the Earth going past us, to simulate a command module coming down to pick up a lunar module that had had some major problems down in low lunar orbit. Then we would do an optical rendezvous, using optics only. As if that were not enough for one mission, the plans for the eva sounded like something out of science fiction. Stafford concentrated on his rendezvous duties and left the spacewalking details to Cernan, viewing the addition of a rocket pack as a “Mickey Mouse idea.” As Stafford recounts, Cernan would fly a rocket pack on a 125-foot tether—an air force experiment, using hydrogen peroxide for maneuvering fuel. We knew it was a risky-type mission flying that rocket pack. What would have happened if one of the thrusters had stuck on, and how would we get it off? Remember, the only thing that we had had experience with on our side was Ed White. There was a lot we didn’t know about working and walking in space. We didn’t have any good simulation. All we’d used to simulate maneuvering around was a polished steel table on an air bearing. Cernan would get on that and we’d scoot him around—we didn’t even have three-dimensional simulation, anything like that. In fact, we were so naïve, we didn’t even think about putting defog on our visors, like you would to go snorkeling or scuba diving. But it was a start; every step was a new step. Gene Cernan agrees that it was a new step, but perhaps a step too far. “We were to build on the spacewalking experience of Gemini 4. Gemini 8 was supposed to do a very extensive eva, which might have taught us a lot prior to Gemini 9. Of course, they had to abort their mission. So we’d lost something in between. The bottom line is we had to jump from Gemini 4’s experience of only twenty minutes of eva. Ed White was smaller than me, and had trouble getting back into the spacecraft, but apparently we didn’t pay too much attention to the problem.”

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Many of the flight control team, mission trainers, and astronauts thought that the rocket pack, called the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit or amu, was too dangerous to use in space. Its use was really only being attempted at the insistence of the air force. nasa tried to reduce the risks by insisting on the safety tether and also making the spacesuit even thicker and thus harder to move in, as Cernan explains: I trained to fly the AMU at the end of that tether, all around the sky, like you have seen them do on the shuttle. One of the unique things about the AMU, unlike the cold gas nitrogen systems they use in these backpacks they fly around in the shuttle: we had hydrogen peroxide. We had real rockets. I remember when we first were designing this unit, they had one of those hydrogen peroxide rockets between our legs—we changed that design pretty quickly! But on top of that, I had to wear steel pants. Full metal-woven steel pants, to keep this thing from burning a hole in my suit. I should have got the message! Tom Stafford must have had a horrible sense of déjà vu. Sitting in a Gemini spacecraft on the pad on 17 May, ready to launch, he and Gene Cernan awaited the liftoff of their Agena docking target. “We got ready to launch,” Stafford recalls. “We heard the Atlas Agena target vehicle lift off from the pad just like we’d heard before on Gemini 6, and this time it was the Atlas that blew up. As I’d lost two Agenas, an Air Force major, one of the support crew members, wrote me a poem. He wrote: ‘I think that I shall never see, an Agena out in front of me.’ And I never did!” As with his previous mission, the launch was scrubbed, and a substitute target was hurriedly devised. Having learned not to rely on the Agenas, Stafford says that nasa was already prepared with a backup option: “McDonnell Aircraft had this idea of a target vehicle where you would take the Agena docking collar, put some batteries in it, some rate gyros, and recycle a used part from Gemini, the attitude control, so that it could hold attitude once that was put into space on top of an Atlas. As a matter of fact, it turned out that it was the reentry control section from my Gemini 6 spacecraft.” The backup vehicle was called an Augmented Target Docking Adapter—or atda, by the acronym-loving nasa engineers—and it was quickly readied for launch: as it turned out, perhaps too quickly. Gene Cernan, in the meantime, had just sat through his first-ever launch attempt, and he later characterized the loss of the Atlas Agena as slightly

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unnerving. “This was my first time around; I had never been on a rocket before. You could hear that big Atlas go up—and you could almost hear it blow up. We were next in line, and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure that this was the right thing to do. But frankly, I wanted to fly so badly I would have gone on that flight if they had strapped me to the outside!” On 1 June 1966, atda was launched and reached the perfect orbit. Telemetry, however, suggested that the launch shroud covering the docking collar had not fully opened. atda was also tumbling, and a suspicion that Stafford had held before was being confirmed: The telemetry on the ground showed that they couldn’t stop the rotation and that they had already got through one of the two rings of attitude fuel. Now, I had questioned the program manager at McDonnell Aircraft at the time—he said that that attitude fuel would last for three to four months. I asked, how could it, you only had twenty-five pounds of fuel in each ring, and just the gravity gradient alone would use that. He says, “Tom, trust me, it will last three to four months.” And here in about half an orbit one ring was gone, and it had started working the other one. And this is one thing: if something just doesn’t feel right to you, particularly if you work in engineering, you ought to go and question it. Everything was measured in specific impulse. When they went to change from seconds to units, and divide by sixty, whoever was working as a sub engineer multiplied it by sixty. So it was off by a factor of 3600! I never let the guy forget it! Despite the problems, Stafford and Cernan were ready to launch and join atda in orbit, but problems with launch control computer equipment meant that the attempt was postponed for forty-eight hours. Stafford had now sat through five launch attempts and had still only flown in space once. His patience, however, was about to be rewarded. Stafford’s sixth launch-day visit to the pad, on 3 June, was a successful one, and as he and Cernan sped into orbit the commander monitored their launch trajectory closely. Stafford was able to use the spacecraft thrusters and data from Mission Control to fly a precise course to their target. He soon had a radar lock on atda. As he grew nearer, he could see the target shining in the strong moonlight. On their third orbit of the Earth, as Stafford drew closer to the tumbling atda, he could see that the telemetry information had been correct: the shroud on their target had not completely detached:

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We finally broke out into daytime. The ground control center wanted us to describe what we saw. I said, “The nose cone of the shroud is still attached, it has opened up and is slowly rotating. It looks like an angry alligator.” I also called it a few other things to Cernan! It turns out that, through a whole series of human mistakes, instead of securing the lanyards by hooking into the socket support, they wrapped them around with another piece of wire and put duct tape over them! Stafford considered using the nose of his spacecraft to try and dislodge the half-opened shroud, but the ground quickly rejected this idea as too risky. Pulling within a few inches of the rotating atda, Stafford looked at it closely. “Gemini was such a maneuverable spacecraft,” he remembers. “I could put my window up where the shroud was, match the spacecraft roll rate, and just stay right there taking pictures of it.” Though the explosive bolts that should have freed the shroud had fired correctly, Stafford could see that the straps holding the cover in place were still fully secure. The ground sent up signals to tighten and relax the docking cone, hoping that this might nudge the shroud free. Nothing worked. Unless there was some way to remove the nose cone, a docking would be impossible. Stafford told the authors that brief consideration was given to removing it by hand: “There were two big 300-pound springs trying to push it apart, and they wanted Cernan to go out, try and take a pair of surgical scissors and cut the two straps. I saw the sharp, jagged edges where the pyrotechnics had fired, and said, no, we’ll just wait and do the eva later.” If Gemini 9 could not dock with the target, at least it could be used to perform rendezvous exercises. First, Stafford and Cernan tried a simple